The Cambridge
Companion to
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The Cambridge Companion to Blues
and Gospel Music
From Robert Johnson to Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson to
John Lee Hooker, blues and gospel artists figure heavily in the
mythology of twentieth-century culture. The styles in which they
sang have proved hugely influential to generations of popular
singers, from the wholesale adoptions of singers like Robert
Cray or James Brown, to the subtler vocal appropriations of
Mariah Carey. Their own music, and how it operates, is not,
however, always seen as valid in its own right.
This book offers an overview of both these genres, which
worked together to provide an expression of twentieth-century
black U.S. experience. Their histories are unfolded and
questioned; representative songs and lyrical imagery are
analyzed; perspectives are offered from the standpoint of the
voice, the guitar, the piano, and also that of the working
musician. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact
the genres have had on mainstream musical culture.
allan moore is Head of the Department of Music at the
University of Surrey, U.K. He has written widely on popular
music and is author of The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band (Cambridge, 1997), and Rock: The Primary Text ( 1993,
2002).
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Cambridge Companion to the Saxophone
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Cambridge Companion to Singing
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Topics
The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music
Edited by Allan Moore
The Cambridge Companion to Jazz
Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn
The Cambridge Companion to the Musical
Edited by William Everett and Paul Laird
The Cambridge Companion to the Orchestra
Edited by Colin Lawson
The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock
Edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street
THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
BLUES AND
GOSPEL MUSIC
EDITED BY
Allan Moore
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© Cambridge University Press 2002
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Contents
List of illustrations [page viii]
Notes on contributors [ix]
Chronology [xii]
Preface [xvii]
1 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music Allan Moore [l]
2 Labels: identifying categories of blues and gospel Jeff Todd Titon [13]
3 The development of the blues David Evans [20 ]
4 The development of gospel music Don Cusic [44]
5 Twelve key recordings Graeme M. Boone [61]
6 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists Steve Tracy [89]
7 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel Barb Jungr [102]
8 The Guitar Matt Backer [l 16]
9 Keyboard techniques Adrian York [ 130]
10 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach Guido van Rijn [ 141]
1 1 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music Dave Headlam [158]
Notes [188]
Bibliography [194]
Selected discography and videography [202]
Index [205]
Illustrations
(between pages 88 and 89)
1 Mahalia Jackson
2 Fred McDowell
3 Bessie Smith, late 1920s
4 Muddy Waters
5 Golden Gate Quartet
6 John Lee Hooker
7 Aretha Franklin
8 Rev. Gary Davis at Keele Folk Festival 1966
9 Thomas A. Dorsey as pianist with Ma Rainey
Contributors
Matt Backer was born in New Orleans and has lived in Mexico City, Brussels,
Caracas, New York, and Leamington Spa. He studied at the Berklee College of
Music and the University of Warwick, but threw it all away in order to become a
freelance guitarist. Artistes he has worked with include Emmylou Harris, Joe
Cocker, Steve Earle, Aimee Mann, Julian Lennon, and Alan Partridge. He also
composes music for film and television and his eagerly awaited solo debut
7s That All is available on Warmfuzz Records.
He woke up this morning and had the blues.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Graeme M. Boone received his A.B. in Music
from the University of California at Berkeley (1976); a Premier prix in music
history from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique, Paris (1979);
and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Music from Harvard University (1987). He
recently co-edited a collection of analytical essays on rock music ( Understanding
Rock, Oxford University Press, 1997), and wrote a monograph on the
relationship between musical and verbal rhythm in fifteenth-century song
(Patterns in Play, University of Nebraska Press, 1999). A documentary history of
jazz is in preparation [Readings in Jazz History, Norton).
Don Cusic is the author of twelve books, including The Sound of Light: A History of
Gospel and Christian Music. He is currently Professor of Music Business at
Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
David Evans received his M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1976) degrees from the
University of California, Los Angeles, in Folklore and Mythology. He is
currently Professor of Music at the University of Memphis. Evans has been a
researcher of blues music since the 1960s. His Tommy Johnson (1971) and Big
Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues ( 1982) are based on his
field research in Mississippi and other southern states. Evans has written
many articles, chapters, and record album notes, and has produced many
albums of field and studio recordings of blues.
Dave Headlam is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of
Music of the University of Rochester. Headlam's book, The Music of Alb an Berg,
published by Yale University Press in 1996, received an A.S.C.A.P. Deems Taylor
Award (1997). Along with colleague Mark Bocko of the Electrical and
Computing Engineering Department at the University of Rochester, Headlam
has received three National Science Foundation Grants for research into
acoustics and the development of a Music Research Lab. Headlam has
published widely on musical topics ranging from popular music to the use of
computers in music research.
Barb Jungr is a singer, performer, and writer. Her CDs on Linn Records have
included new translations of the works of Brel and Ferre and a forthcoming
x Contributors
collection of the songs of Bob Dylan, Every Grain Of Sand. Her interests and
singing styles include contemporary European cabaret, chansons, gospel, blues,
r&b, traditional and soul. Born in Rochdale she received her Master of Music at
Goldsmiths College, London, in 1996. She won the Perrier Award in 1987 for
the show Brown Blues, received a Gulbenkian Award to study physical theatre
techniques in the early 1990s and is currently touring, singing and leading
workshops internationally.
Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey, Allan F. Moore heads the
Department of Music there. He is a composer and author of Rock: The Primary
Text (a revised edition of which was recently published by Ashgate) and a study
of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, in addition to many articles on popular music and
modernism. On the editorial board of Popular Music, he also reviews
occasionally for B.B.C. Radio 4.
Jeff Todd Titon is the author of numerous articles and books on blues including
Early Downhome Blues (2nd edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
and Downhome Blues Lyrics (2nd edition, University of Illinois Press, 1990).
From 1990 to 1995 he was editor of Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society
for Ethnomusicology. A guitarist, he played with the Lazy Bill Lucas Blues Band
and performed at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. In 1971 he joined the
faculty of Tufts University, where he taught in the departments of English and
music. Since 1986 he has been Professor of Music and Director of the Ph.D.
program in ethnomusicology at Brown University.
Steven C. Tracy is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Langston Hughes and the Blues,
Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City, and A Brush with the
Blues, general co-editor of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, and editor of
Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader. A singer and harmonica player, he
has recorded with Big Joe Duskin, Pigmeat Jarrett, Albert Washington, the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and his own group, Steve Tracy and the
Crawling Kingsnakes.
Guido van Rijn is a teacher of English at Kennemer Lyceum in Overveen, The
Netherlands. In 1970 he co-founded The Netherlands Blues and Boogie
Organization, whose work culminated in the annual Utrecht Blues Estafette. He
has published many articles in specialist magazines like Blues Unlimited, Blues &
Rhythm and Living Blues, and has produced seventeen LPs and CDs for his own
Agram label. His Ph.D. dissertation from Leiden University was revised as the
award-winning Roosevelt's Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on
FDR (1997). A sequel entitled The Truman and Eisenhower Blues will be
published in 2002.
Adrian York works in music education, as a media composer and as a performer.
He lectures at the University of Westminster and the Guildhall School of Music,
works as syllabus director for Rockschool, the popular music examination
board, and directs the Jazz FM Jazzworks school workshops. Recent TV.
commissions include theme and incidental music for broadcasters including
xi Contributors
the B.B.C., I.T.V. and Channels 4 and 5. He has worked as a performer and
musical director for many of the top names in popular music and jazz and at
the moment is musical director of the Jazz FM Quintet. He writes regularly for
Music Teacher magazine, contributed to the recent national curriculum syllabus
in music and has his own series of popular piano arrangements (The Style File)
published by Chester.
Chronology
The 130-odd entries in the chronology which follows highlight some of the
factors which, by common agreement, have fashioned the blues and gospel
into what we know today. It consists of the release dates of recordings whose
style or wider impact is notable, of events which have helped shape both the
genres and the lives of African Americans, and of the first appearance of,
particularly, key styles. For this latter reason, more recent entries are limited.
The emphasis must be very much on the period 1920-70, when these genres
were most active. The beginning of the period is marked by the advent of
recording; its end by the genres' diminution as a vital cultural force.
1619 disembarkation of first (20) Africans on American soil
1641 slavery first made legal, in Massachusetts
1698 first edition of Bay Psalm Book with melodies
1739 Isaac Watts' Hymns and Spiritual Songs published in the U.S.A.
(original English publication 1707)
1780 institution of first African American church in Savannah, Georgia
1800 establishment of the revival spiritual - sacred words to folk
melodies - with the Kentucky Revival
1801 Richard Allen publishes the widely used Collection of Spiritual Songs
and Hymns
1862 first recorded reference to "the blues" in the diary of Charlotte Forten
1867 first publication of Slave Songs of the United States
1871 first tour by Fisk Jubilee Singers
first of the Moody-Sankey revival meetings
1883 repeal of 1875 Civil Rights Act, enabling segregationist practices
1896 U.S. Supreme Court approves Southern States' segregation laws
1897 first published ragtime: Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag"
1903 Victor Talking Machine Records make recordings of camp meeting
shouts - first recorded black music
1908 first published sheet music using the name "blues," Antonio
Maggio's "I Got the Blues"
1909 U.S. Copyright Act commodifies the popular song
1910 start of mass northward migration by African Americans
formation of the mixed-race N.A.A.C.R
1913 foundation of the first black-owned music publishing house, that of
Harry Pace & W. C. Handy
1916 Homer Rodeheaver founds gospel recording label
xiii Chronology
1917 first appearance of recorded jazz, by Original Dixieland Jazz Band
"slack key" guitar craze sweeps U.S.A. - origins of bottleneck
technique
1920 first recordings of vocal blues by a black singer, Mamie Smith's
"What is This Thing Called Love" and "Crazy Blues"
women enfranchised in the U.S.A.
1921 first U.S. radio broadcast of church service
W. C. Handy sets up Black Swan Records, first black-owned
recording company
1923 establishment of "race records" as identifying genre
earliest field recording sessions (those of Okeh Records)
Bessie Smith records Sara Martin's "Mama's Got the Blues," first in a
line of moving performances
earliest appearance of boogie piano bass line, Clay Custer's
"The Rocks"
1924 first recording of a rural blues - Ed Andrews' "Barrel House Blues"
1925 regular use made of electrical recording (using microphones)
Charles Davenport records "Cow Cow Blues"
1926 Blind Lemon Jefferson begins recording, to unprecedented success
key recordings of Arizona Dranes, defining gospel piano style
first recording of solo guitar gospel - Blind Joe Taggart
1927 talking pictures mark beginning of a decline in record industry
Meade Lux Lewis records "Honky Tonk Train Blues"
J. M. Gates' recorded sermons vastly outsell Bessie Smith recordings
Blind Willie Johnson records "Dark was the Night, Cold was the
Ground"
1928 Thomas Dorsey & Tampa Red record "Tight Like That," marking the
"hokum" craze
Pine Top Smith records "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"
first recordings by Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell
1929 first emergence of "boogie-woogie" as genre term
Charley Patton (already in his forties) has his first recording session
1932 low point of blues recordings, by nos.
Thomas Dorsey & Sallie Martin establish the Gospel Singer's
convention, Chicago
1933 repeal of Prohibition - beginning of fall in sales of gospel recordings
Leadbelly "discovered" by Alan Lomax
1935 revival of boogie-woogie piano begins, leading eventually to jump
blues
1936 key recordings of Robert Johnson
first recordings of Harlem Hamfats (origin of jump blues)
first recordings by Golden Gate Quartet
xiv Chronology
1937 Sonny Boy Williamson introduces harmonica to the blues line-up
1938 John Hammond's Carnegie Hall "Spirituals to Swing" Concerts,
bringing boogie-woogie to public attention
Bill Broonzy uses electric guitar, adding drums in 1942
Big Joe Turner records "Roll 'em, Pete," moving from Basie-style big
band to "shout" blues
1939 introduction to gospel of the Hammond organ/piano combination
1940 T-Bone Walker begins recording
this decade sees peak of African American migration from the South
1941 first regular broadcasting slot, of Rice Miller & Robert Lockwood Jr.
on K.F.FA., Arkansas
1942 formation of Apollo Records, largely recording black gospel artists
beginning of two-year American Federation of Musicians' ban on
commercial recording
Billboard sets up "race" chart, the "Harlem Hit Parade"
1943 beginning of increase in no. of blues recordings (peaking in 1947)
1945 formation of Specialty, with a similar roster to Apollo
Cecil Cant records "I Wonder," crossing over to the white market
1946 Roy Milton records "R. M. Blues," one of the first black recordings to
exceed a million sales
Louis Jordan's "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" does likewise, attracting
attention nationwide
1947 Frankie Laine records "That's my Desire," attempting to combine
"black" and "white" elements
formation of Atlantic Records, key blues label aimed at mixed
audiences
formation of Chess Records, vital in the development of
rhythm' n'blues
1948 John Lee Hooker records "Boogie Chillun'"
Radio W.D.I A. in Memphis begins broadcasting only black music
Muddy Waters records "I Can't Be Satisfied," defining new r&b style
1949 end of "race" as genre category
Billboard adopts term "rhythm' n'blues"
B. B. King begins recording
Big Jay McNeely's "Deacon's Hop" combines gospel with hard r&b
1950 formation of Word Records, largest gospel label
1951 Jackie Brenston & Ike Turner record "Rocket 88," frequently cited as
the originary r&b record
Bill Broonzy tours U.K.
1952 Mahalia Jackson sings in London, becomes known outside gospel
circles
xv Chronology
1953 Ray Charles crosses over from gospel with "I Gotta Woman"
The Orioles record "Crying in the Chapel," combining r&b with
gospel, and scoring in both the pop and r&b charts
1954 Bill Haley records "Shake, Rattle & Roll"
The Chords record "Sh-Boom," initiating the doo-wop style
beginning of major decline in no. of blues recordings (bottoming
out in 1963)
segregated schooling declared illegal in U.S. by Supreme Court
order
1955 popularity for the blues markedly on the wane, coincident with the
growing push for African American rights
Little Richard records "Tutti Frutti," identifying "rock'n'roll" with
manner of performance
Chuck Berry records "Maybellene," demonstrating importance to
rock'n'roll of teenage concerns
1956 (gospel) recording debut of Aretha Franklin
Elvis Presley records "Hound Dog"
Lonnie Donegan records "Rock Island Line"
Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" initiates a highly successful market
for r&b/rock'n'roll/country crossover
1957 Sam Cooke records "You Send Me," turning his back on gospel
Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" reinforces white
Romantic view of African American lifestyle
1958 Chris Barber brings Muddy Waters to perform in London
1959 formation of Stax Records
formation of Tamla Motown
1960 Elvis Presley records "His Hand in Mine," helping to define
contemporary white gospel genre
1961 Freddie King records "Hideaway," launching ground for the U.K.
blues movement
1962 Bobby Bland records key hit "Stormy Monday"
1963 black political protest in U.S.A. marked by march on Washington
Billboard closes its r&b charts because they were duplicating the
content of the pop charts
1964 Civil Rights Act bans all forms of segregation
1965 James Brown records "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"
riots in Watts district of Los Angeles
1966 coining of "Black Power" as a political slogan
1967 birth of The Jesus Movement in San Francisco
1968 Mahalia Jackson sings at Martin Luther King's funeral
James Cleveland's first Gospel Workshop of America
xvi Chronology
National Association of Television & Radio Announcers convention
explodes along racial lines over the question of crossover
B. B. King plays Fillmore West to a white, not a black, audience
1969 Edwin Hawkins Singers release "Oh Happy Day," re-popularizing
gospel
Gospel-singer Roberta Martin's funeral in Chicago attracts huge
crowds
1970 Washington Blues Festival produced by African Americans, for them
1971 Marvin Gaye releases What's Going On
1972 Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace crosses over strongly to the pop
charts
1973 Stevie Wonder releases Inner Visions
1977 CBS's integrated marketing policy marks low-point in income for
the majority of African American artists
1983 formation of the London Community Gospel Choir, premier such
U.K. institution
1984 Prince (Purple Rain) and Michael Jackson (Thriller - 1982) appear
to question their racial characteristics in their music
1985 Stevie Ray Vaughan releases Texas Flood, marking a resurgence of
white performer interest in "authentic" blues styling
1987 Billboard introduces a "Hot Crossover" chart
1989 John Lee Hooker releases The Healer, achieving mainstream success
1998 R. L. Burnside releases Come On In, bringing hip-hop scratching and
electronica to a raw blues style
1999 Taj Mahal, one of the most-recorded blues singers, releases Kulanjan
with Mali musicians, marking yet another crucial stylistic crossover
2001 by the turn of the century, as an indication of the genre's continuing
popularity, there are at least twenty-eight major annual blues and
blues-related festivals
Preface
Some time probably in 1971, in a run-down cinema in a tiny town on
the coast of middle England, a singer/guitarist then unknown to me flew
for ten minutes over the simplest harmonic structure. To someone then
coming to grips with the harmonies of early modernism, this performance
by Ten Years After on the film of the Woodstock festival was a revelation,
perhaps analogous in impact to the effect of people like B. B. King on a
young Eric Clapton a decade earlier. There was a crucial difference, however.
Having undertaken a metaphorical journey back to discovering where such
performances came from, I was interested not in trying to re-create and relive
that atmosphere as the British blues movement was, but in understanding
it as something I could never fully partake in. It is for this reason that, as a
scholar of popular music, I have undertaken to put together this volume. The
twin roles of fan and scholar of popular music are now common currency,
even if the necessary tensions are irresolvable, even in theory. Those tensions
are, in their way, manifested in this collection. Although all the contributors
to this volume are both fans and scholars, some participate in the musical
practices they describe, while others (myself, for instance) only observe.
We thus form a microcosm of the involvement of our readership for, while
the public taste for consuming both blues and gospel is more stabilized
now that it was twenty or thirty years ago, a sizeable number of people still
perform the music, and are themselves involved in critical admiration of
music produced up to eighty years ago.
The scope of the Cambridge Companions is large indeed, covering gen-
res, oeuvres, repertoires shown to have had an undeniable effect on music-
making in the industrialized West. It is therefore entirely appropriate that
the series should contain a volume devoted to genres of music originating
with a disenfranchised slave culture in small pockets of what is now the
United States of America, genres which have posed a perennial challenge
to the music of established culture. That challenge must remain as a sub-
text. Those genres, of blues and gospel, are the subject of this volume and,
because they are not always deemed worthy of the depth of attention they
receive here, it is valuable, briefly, to ponder the apparent differences be-
tween these genres, their developments, and those of the European concert
hall and opera house where such depth of attention goes unremarked.
For many years after its appearance in the early years of the previous
century, the blues was a largely improvised music. With the exception of
[xvii] some moments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, improvisation
xviii Preface
has never really been a denning feature of the music of the classical tradi-
tion, which now in any case depends on reproducing, with various degrees
of fidelity, the instructions of a usually absent (because dead) composer. In-
dividual blues and gospel numbers did not have distinct identities - singers
modified a received model in the process of performance. Items in both
the classical and popular traditions, however, depend for their commercial
viability on their identity, on being able to ascertain that one is listening to
this piece or song or performance as opposed to that. Gospel songs, while
opportunities for the display of abilities, were used as mediation between
groups of oppressed individuals and a concrete, substantial, God. Classical
music, to the extent that it has a "spiritual" dimension, moves only in an
abstract, unfocused realm. Finally, the blues and gospel were recognized as
indispensable to the very cultural survival of their users. Both classical and
popular music, except insofar as they provide the opportunity for gainful
employment, seem, by comparison, luxuries. There are, of course, similar-
ities too. All the music discussed above depends now, to a greater or lesser
extent, on recordings, which reduces each to the status of a reproducible
product. It all, too, contributes greatly to the imaginative lives of those who
spend time with it. It is the differences, however, which dominate, differ-
ences which for some years have encouraged proponents to argue for the
inherent, or at least ethical, superiority of one or other tradition. No such
assumption is made in this collection, except insofar as blues and gospel
are seen as legitimate means of expression in their own right, requiring no
defense from the practices of other musics.
It is worth pointing out here that the content of individual chapters is
not rigidly delimited: singers, songs, events, are referred to in more than
one place; after all, each contributor is observing the same material, from
his or her own vantage point. Certain areas of possible enquiry have had to
be omitted for various reasons, not least because there is a lot of research
which remains to be done. And in any case, comprehensive coverage is
naturally impossible - in a volume of limited size, even more so. It is my
intention, however, that this Companion provides both enough answers,
and subsequent questions, to enable you to deepen whatever understanding
you have of those most pervasive of twentieth-century genres, blues and
gospel music.
1 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues
and gospel music
ALLAN MOORE
Blues and gospel are widely familiar as generic labels, and have extensive
histories both in their own right and as genres influential on other forms of
music. They emerged within oral traditions of African American culture,
embodying interpretation of, and responses to, experience in two differing
realms (broadly, the secular and the sacred) . They were then both taken up by
the music industry and disseminated particularly from the 1920s. We know
them through recordings, particularly, but their surrounding circumstances
we know through writings. In this introduction, I want to lay out some of
that knowledge, raising a few of the key questions as to how these genres
function.
Although many books devoted to them treat them as separate, if related,
genres, in this book we acknowledge their deep linkage. Indeed, Samuel
Floyd (1995: 6) goes so far as to insist that they originated in exactly the
same impulses, and that they are therefore alternative expressions of the
same need. This is such a crucial issue that it is worth focusing on it straight
away. Take the music of the Rev. Gary Davis. Was he a blues singer? Was he
a gospel singer? In listening to him sing "Twelve gates to the city," to which
genre are we responding? His guitar playing provides both the solid sort of
underpinning we might expect from a street musician, together with flashes
of virtuosic brilliance and moments of call-and-response patterning (that
wonderful bass scale), and extensive bent thirds. The structure and content
of the lyric, however, are far from this - the "city" is celestial, not earthy.
Or take an avowedly blues singer. What are we responding to when Bessie
Smith sings "Moan, you moaners?" Accompanied as she is by a piano and
gospel quartet, she brings with her all the technique and expression she has
acquired in singing of her own troubles to a determinedly gospel lyric. And
what about those gospel quartets? When the Heavenly Gospel Singers let
rip on "Lead me to the rock," they demonstrate their total ease with blue
notes, with the blues' driving rhythm and vocal expression given by "dirty"
timbres (growls, hollers etc.) These may be relatively extreme examples,
but they demonstrate audibly that there was no clear dividing line between
the blues and gospel in the lives of (some of) their exponents. Add to this
such frequent crossing of the sacred/secular dividing line as that made by
2 Allan Moore
Thomas A. Dorsey, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard
Penniman and others, and we begin to observe the artificiality of any such
division. Christopher Small puts it trenchantly:
It has been said that if gospel is the present-day paradigm of
Afro-American religious musicking, so blues is of secular. It would be
more true to say that blues and gospel are twin modern aspects of that
ritual of survival which is the musical act . . . there is a good deal of quite
secular enjoyment of both spirituals and gospel music, so in blues . . .
there is a strong element of what can only be called the religious.
(Small 1987: 191)
It is impossible to date the origin of the blues with any precision, al-
though its roots in the music which West African slaves would have brought
with them to the Americas have always been assumed. There are accounts
of calls and field hollers back into the nineteenth century. Working in-
dividually in the fields in comparative quiet, such calls had practical use
(to ease the drudgery of repetitive actions, or to call instructions to animals)
but they would also sometimes become communal expressions, as when
one field hand picked up the call from another, and so on. These workers
were politically segregated. The hopes which had arisen in the wake of the
1875 Civil Rights Act, which gave blacks equal treatment in terms of access
to accommodation, places of entertainment, and public transport, were
dashed on its repeal in 1883. Segregation became more rigidly enforced to
the extent that in 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court validated new segregationist
laws (the "Jim Crow" system) enacted in southern legislatures (and which
received national government sanction in 1913). These were extreme. The
economic depression of the 1 880s and 1 890s hit African Americans hardest,
as they were increasingly barred from any form of economic competition
with whites. And, as the blues became identified as a recognizable genre
(singers like the stylistically eclectic Henry Thomas and Charley Patton,
born in the 1870s and 1880s, are usually cited as among the first "blues"
singers), someone like Patton was treated as racially "black" even though he
had long, wavy hair and a comparatively light skin. The repertoire of most
of these singers extended far wider than just the blues - folksongs, dances,
worksongs, even minstrel songs on occasion. The term "blues," however, has
attained such currency that it has come to symbolize the entire repertoire. 1
Many of these early singers were travelers. A disproportionate num-
ber were blind or otherwise disabled (music being one of the few sources
of income for such individuals), carrying their songs from community to
community by railroad, by steamboats, by wagon and even by foot. As
travelers, it was vital that their means of earning were portable - hence
the widespread adoption of the guitar as an accompanying instrument.
3 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music
(The guitar had played a role in both nascent jazz bands, for example that
of Buddy Bolden in the late 1890s, and the early string bands.) Blues thus
settled down in the years prior to their first recordings as an acoustic form,
in which the singer accompanies him- (or less often her-) self on the guitar,
particularly for various social events (dances, picnics etc.). This form has
been identified by various names: country blues or rural blues (recognizing
its original location) or downhome blues (a term more favored by players
themselves). Geographical location is also important: there are recognizable
stylistic differences between singers emanating from Texas, from Mississippi,
from Alabama or from Georgia.
These differences became first consolidated, then subsequently aban-
doned in the steady pattern of northward migration which began in the
failure of the post-war Reconstruction. It gradually increased in speed dur-
ing the latter part of the nineteenth century, reaching a first peak in the
years immediately before the First World War. Migrants from Mississippi,
for example, tended to gravitate towards Chicago, at least in part (it must
be assumed) in response to calls from militant black organizations in the
North, some of whom even offered free transport. There were mixed mo-
tives at work here. Southern states clearly did not value black labor, so they
were encouraged to demonstrate a responsibility to their families and their
community to move northwards; the Depression made lives as southern
land-workers even more difficult; the resentment felt by southerners at this
desertion merely compounded matters. Leaving the South, however, cre-
ated two new sets of problems and at least one opportunity. By the early
part of the twentieth century, the migration had gathered such pace as to
create ghettoes in northern cities, generally in the most run-down districts
which were already inhabited by European immigrants, and from which new
rounds of racial disharmony arose. In the North, however, a black middle
class had developed into professions such as teaching and into small busi-
ness ownership. Conflicts then arose between northerners' aspirations into
white culture, and the more overtly distinct, black culture, being brought
in from the South. In spite of these difficulties, the launch in 1910 of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, an inter-
racial organization, began to make strides in pushing for equality of treat-
ment, even if that was not to have any real impact in the field of music for
some time. 2
The northward migration, however, did. In centers like Chicago and
Kansas, both jazz bands and the (now-primitive) technology of the electric
guitar could be found. Steel guitar strings had replaced the more tradi-
tional nylon at the turn of the century, in the desire for a louder sound, and
early electric guitars were experimented with in the 1920s, but it was not
until the late 1930s that an amplified open-body model was commercially
4 Allan Moore
viable (the solid-body instrument we all know arrived in 1952). Among
the earliest blues exponents were Bill Broonzy, who did so much to popu-
larize the blues in Europe in the 1950s, and Muddy Waters. Not only did
these instruments provide a louder sound, to enable the instrument to com-
pete on equal terms with trumpets and saxophones, but they were able to
produce a harmonically richer sound, whose "dirty" timbres were seized
on by players like Waters, in expressing a continuity with the rural inheri-
tance but in updated form. Thus the "urban" blues which was to form the
backbone of "rhythm'n'blues" (r&b) and subsequently "rock'n'roll," and
which depended not only on the electric guitar and the (microphonically)
amplified voice, but particularly the saxophone prominent in the midwest -
ern jazz and jump bands. And indeed, the reality the urban blues dealt with
also demonstrated a continuity: a new wave of migration began with the
Second World War and the need for workers in the armament factories of
the industrialized North, while overcrowding within the ghettoes (Harlem
in particular) grew exponentially. It was only after 1950 that middle-class
black aspirations began to be achieved, and as the Civil Rights movement
gained momentum through the 1950s, and as accommodation to the status
quo became more widely replaced by a discourse of struggle, the blues faded
from black awareness, as embodying a message which was out of tune with
the times.
Although this line of development of the blues appears to have some
historical priority, the first recorded presence of the blues was as a very
different genre. In a society as deeply divided as that of the U.S.A. at the
turn of the century, to be a black woman was to suffer a double oppression,
from which the world of entertainment offered one of the few avenues of es-
cape. This opportunity may seem paradoxical until we recall, as Charles Keil
(1966) observed, that while black men were seen to pose a threat to white
women, black women presented a sexual appeal to white men. This pres-
ence also received support from the suffragette movement - both women's
enfranchisement and the first classic blues recording date from 1920. As a
genre, the sound was also very different. Rather than the itinerant soloist,
we have polished performers (for whom dress was quite clearly a matter
of some import) accompanied by small jazz bands, with a far more sub-
tle individualization of expression than found among country bluesmen.
Crucial to the development here was the blues which pianists played; and
which developed from ragtime into barrelhouse and boogie-woogie. The
piano was a far more respectable instrument than the guitar. It had already
figured in the growth of ragtime, the first black style to acquire some sort of
legitimacy (identified as it was by means of its composers), and featured in
the first published blues, which dates to 1908. Whereas the guitar was suited
to performance outdoors, in the street, the piano was both a less public
5 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music
instrument (indoor performance enabled control over those who would
hear it) and a more public instrument (the large numbers of people invited
to rent parties, for example, were there partly because of the presence of
the piano player). With the Depression and the rise of talking films, live
performance was hit, and the classic blues effectively died, although the
combination of jazz instruments and blues vocal returned, as we have seen,
in aspects of the urban blues.
Compared to the blues, gospel has both a longer and a shorter history.
Longer, in that its roots can be more easily observed, because committed to
paper, in the music used by the earliest European settlers. Shorter, because
the term itself is of recent origin. The earliest sacred songs were a form
of security, a basis for trust among those carving out a new existence in a
foreign land. The continuity involved here was less with the culture they
had left behind, than with the faith they had taken with them. Thus the
earliest publications (such as the Bay Psalm Book) demonstrated subtle,
but nonetheless real, differences from the development such music had
undergone particularly in England. Evangelization among blacks was slow -
an ideology of equality sat uneasily alongside a culture which could not
operate without slave labor. Nonetheless, by the early nineteenth century,
black congregations could be found, some of whom expressed their faith
musically in an amalgam of both European and African practices. These
were most visible in the revival movement in the South, in which spirituals
as we know them arose. The communality inherent in these is, on the surface,
distinct from the individuality that would subsequently come to be a feature
of blues performance - rather than express the response of an individual
to his or her circumstances as we find in a solo guitar blues, spirituals
express a communal response, frequently using biblical texts which would
have been common currency It is better, however, to regard the same as
being true of the blues - although the manner of performance may be more
individual, the texts are again frequently common currency, as they migrate
from performance to performance. What is notably missing from both these
genres, is the striving for an originality of expression, identifying the singer
as an individual distinct from the community.
Spirituals remained the means of sacred expression right into the twenti-
eth century, even if the label sometimes changed ("gospel hymns" and "holy
roller hymns" are perhaps the most notable). Authors, too, had greater vis-
ibility - maybe the clearest secular equivalent to revivalist songwriter and
singer Ira Sankey would have been ragtime composer Scott Joplin, rather
than any particular blues singer of a similar period. Black churches also
grew, in which spirituals would form the musical fare. And, the split which
existed in secular culture - between middle-class and working blacks, be-
tween North and South, between white and black - was to a certain extent
6 Allan Moore
played out in the sacred realm too. Prior to the Civil War, blacks and whites
would often worship in the same congregation, albeit segregated within
the building. Subsequently, however, the increasing racial separation forced
many black congregations solely into their own communities. The Baptist
and Holiness churches were only perhaps the most visible groupings. This
music was, however, made available and acceptable to white audiences
(as had minstrel songs before them), through traveling groups such as the
Fisk Jubilee Singers. This process of making acceptable, however, entailed
a simplification and standardization (and notation) of the rich (and not
notatable) performance practices associated with the repertoire. Such stan-
dardization and other forms of crossover were to continue throughout the
following century.
The key issue which both these genres faced as we enter the era of record-
ings is that of commodification. As early as 1909, it became possible to
assert ownership of songs through copyright legislation, and immediately
the hitherto dominant position whereby it had been the performer, and the
performance, which carried identity, was challenged. Ownership in this way
is a very Europeanized practice - in order to create something to be copy-
righted, there is an assumption that it carries originality, that it marks out
the autonomy of its creator. Assertion of ownership is necessary in order
to sell the song, in order to make financial gain (or at least recompense)
out of the processes needed to record it and which, until very recently, were
beyond the means and the techniques of most working musicians. How-
ever, within African American culture, that is (or, at least, was) a markedly
unsympathetic approach. I shall refer below to the practice which has be-
come known as "signifyin(g)" - suffice it to say here that, singing as they
have done of acknowledged shared experience, by means of shared texts, the
identification of ownership of such a text is a deeply problematic concept.
So, although the term "gospel" may only have come into common usage
since the 1940s, gospel scholarship has a much longer history. Before the
end of the nineteenth century, gospel biographies could be found, while
noted hymn-writer Ira Sankey's My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns
appeared in 1906. Anthony Heilbut's The Gospel Sound, an early history
(written as gospel was becoming subsumed within popular culture and
dedicated to "all the gospel singers who didn't sell out"), finds the origins of
gospel songs in the eighteenth- century hymns of writers like John Wesley
and Isaac Watts, as we have seen, indeed finding in one of the latter the
mood which makes it an ancestor of the blues too (Heilbut 1971: 21). It is
only recently, however, that a commonsense history (of which Broughton's
is only one of the more recent, if more widely read, examples) has begun
to be questioned. For example, Michael Harris' recent study of Thomas A.
Dorsey reconceptualized the origin of what we now know as gospel, seeing it
7 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music
as the interaction of old-line, protestant religion, and blues practices. Prior
to Dorsey's work, gospel had been sung from notation. He inserted into
such performing manners of, essentially, improvisation, which led to the
rise of Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin and others as song-leaders. His crucial
song "Take my hand, precious Lord," served to unify what were becoming
disparate traditions within different sects. The continuity between the old
spirituals and the new gospel is defined by Harris in terms of their both being
strategies of coping within oppressive societies, a strategy which equally
underpins the blues.
The first thoroughgoing histories of the blues were written by British
authors. This concentration on a marginalized U.S. form by Britons is a fea-
ture not only of commentators but of players too, as this book's final chapter
will observe. For many, the dominant figure in blues scholarship has been
Paul Oliver. His Story of the Blues (1969), while historical in outlook, em-
phasized the importance of both lyrics and geography to an understanding
of the genre, wherein different regions had their own traditions, while blues
musicians were apt to wander. As I have suggested, these routes of migration
remain important. The other early history, that of Giles Oakley, began life
as a series of B. B.C. documentaries broadcast in 1976. Like Oliver, the ap-
proach is chronological and lyric-based, but pays less attention to geography
and, in a sense, adds little new. This strand of writing remains important:
Francis Davis' History of the Blues develops from a series of U.S. TV. docu-
mentaries much as Oakley's had and, while new sources are used and the
history is brought up to date, the format does not permit much penetration
of problematic issues. Lyrics were also an early focus of study: for example,
Harry Oster printed lyrics to 221 songs collected between 1959 and 1961
(with little concern for how they were sung) and arranged them according
to eighteen distinct themes (cotton farming, gambling, drinking, traveling
etc.). He suggested they have significance "as a reflection of folk attitudes
and their functions as self-expression, catharsis of emotional disturbance,
social protest, identification with society, and accompaniment to sensuous
dancing ..." (1969: 61), but his preference for this form (collected largely
from prisoners in gaol) over what he calls "city blues" is very clear.
Oster also claimed that respondents distinguished clearly between
singing blues and spirituals (1969: 4). Although he claimed they felt that
one couldn't live in both worlds, this does not diminish the observation that
both blues and spirituals represented strategies of coping. This claim also
runs against the contemporary observation of John Storm Roberts (1972:
173-4) that the division was never clear cut. Even some of the earliest singers
(Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James) provide sufficient examples of this,
although singers did sometimes adopt pseudonyms, possibly to acknowl-
edge audience unease with singers crossing such a boundary of taste. Indeed,
8 Allan Moore
it is with a difference of taste, rather than a difference of function, that the
boundary lies.
It was with two 1 960s studies, those of Charles Keil and Amiri Baraka, that
our understanding of how the blues functioned socially came of age. Keil's
Urban Blues, which originally came out in 1966, demonstrates concern not
just with the forms he observed, but with the people he was writing about.
A key feature of Keil's critique was his elucidation of the "moldy fig" men-
tality of the majority of those writing at the time (1991: 34-5) . 3 Although he
acknowledges that their documentation was invaluable, he laments the lack
of concern they showed with current (commercialized) music. The difficulty
he highlights is a perennial problem. For example, in Samuel Charters' early
study of the country blues, he explores a music which fascinates him, from
the position of an outsider looking in. 4 This position is always in tension
with the insider's account, in the problems of potential misrepresentation
it raises, but these are ultimately the same problems encountered in any
reductive account. In a telling phrase, Keil downplays the importance of
"originality":
The blues artist, in telling his story, crystallizes and synthesizes not only
his own experience but the experiences of his listeners. It is the intensity
and conviction with which the story is spelled out, the fragments of
experience pieced together, rather than the story itself which makes one
bluesman better than another. (1991: 161)
We might rephrase this, in saying that it is not the "what" that counts, but
the "how," noting that this represents a clear difference from most of what
passes for the study of music. Keil's work was crucial for the thinking of
Christopher Small, whose Music of the Common Tongue developed a legit -
imatization of black U.S. forms at the expense of the European classical
tradition - the two are contrasted both musically and socially and the latter
found wanting. Michael Haralambos' earlier sociological study (Right On!)
was not guilty of the focus on "old music" which so angered Keil, but was fo-
cused on moving forward historically. Haralambos argued that, from the late
1960s onward, the acceptance by black Americans of the "accommodatory"
message of the blues had been replaced by an acceptance of the message
proclaimed by soul: that society should and must be changed for the bet-
ter, and that they could actually be agents for such change. Albert Murray's
Stomping the Blues also had a forward-looking focus: it was unusual at the
time in that, while it made reference to country blues artists, Murray was
concerned with the transformation of classic blues through aspects of jazz
and the r&b represented by Joe Turner and Louis Jordan, into the basis of
popular music, which explains why he is more interested in matters of per-
formance than in, for example, lyrics. None of this, of course, is to say that
9 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music
the blues hasn't remained popular both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. One of
the most recent large annual European blues festivals took place in Utrecht
in 1999, still drawing large crowds keen to see rare U.S. visitors - on that
occasion including Johnny Jones, Tomcat Courtney, Wolfman Washington
etc. Indeed, there are dozens of annual festivals worldwide, celebrating a
style which has remained static for some time. Whether the recent stylistic
experiments of someone like R. L. Burnside will result in a new lease of
stylistic life remains to be seen.
Amiri Baraka's Blues People (originally published in 1963) was the first
unambiguous attempt to place the blues within the cultural experience of
blacks in the U.S.A. That it should have taken so long is a clear comment
on its "low" status as music, on the minimal value placed on understanding
the culture, and indeed on the lack of interest in understanding how music
functions socially in general. Baraka saw the emergence of the blues as mark-
ing the transition from the African as transient to the African as American.
He emphasizes the necessary separation of the genre while it nonetheless
operates within a larger culture: "Rhythm & blues . . . was performed almost
exclusively for, and had to satisfy, a [1940s] Negro audience" (1995: 169)
when measured against the co-option of swing. His general thesis is clearly
stated at the end of the book: he sees the
continuous re-emergence of strong Negro influences to revitalize
American popular music . . . [but] what usually happened . . . [was that]
finally too much exposure to the debilitating qualities of popular
expression tended to lessen the emotional validity of the Afro-American
forms; then more or less violent reactions to this overexposure altered
their overall shape. (1995: 220)
Nelson George's more recent epitaph is in this tradition. Defining r&b both
musically and sociologically (and, for the former, seeing it as identical to
rock'n'roll and as the progenitor of "soul, funk, disco, rap, and other off-
spring . . ." [1988: xii]), he argues that the drive for racial integration and
cultural assimilation, effected largely through the intentional search for
crossovers, has resulted in atrophy for the form (an atrophy partially re-
versed by the rise of rap and the recovery of a rootedness of the music in
everyday experience in the 1980s). Blame is largely laid at the door of the
major labels who moved in on the music from the late 1960s on.
This range of writings testifies to the recognition of the crucial role
of the music's originators. What, though, of the music they originated?
Jeff Todd Titon's Early Downhome Blues was the first influential study of
the musical facets of the genre, although, as an ethnomusicologist, Titon
treats them firmly within the context of the culture from which they arise.
He notably attacked the simple concept of the "blue third" as a harmonic
10 Allan Moore
construct, arguing that the scale degrees are far more fluid than in other
Western musics. This study also makes use of lyric analysis, finding a range
of formulae (there because the blues are frequently invented on the spot)
which parallel the formulaic nature of the melodies. The crucial concept here
is that of "song families" whereby bits of material (lines of lyric, melodic
shapes) migrate from one song to another, within family lines. 5 This forms
an important point of difference between gospel and blues, for Anne Dhu
Shapiro (1992) has argued that this aspect is far less important in spirituals
than are particular performance practices: call and response, minimal lyrics
and the free variation of short melodic phrases. Formally, gospel seems to
be less regulated than the apparently ubiquitous "twelve-bar blues."
Histories of music in the U.S.A. have been around for years, but Eileen
Southern's attempt to write a history of the music of African Americans was
a vital move. Her history is concerned to trace all forms of music-making
and, although her focus is clearly on the legitimation of the music (blues is
treated as a precursor of jazz, for instance, while r&b and gospel are passed
over very swiftly), an argument now clearly dated, the willingness to be com-
prehensive is notable. This is also the case with two other studies appear-
ing at around the same time. Harold Courlander's Negro Folk Music U.S.A.
places both blues, and what he declares singers term "Anthems," in the
wider, explicit, context of worksongs, singing games, dances and the like.
With primary concentration on texts, there is again a lack of interest in
commercialized forms. The context for John Storm Roberts' Black Music
of Two Worlds is what are now known as "African retentions" throughout
the Americas, an aspect that has become of increasing importance. For
Roberts, it is the general qualities of performance practice which he finds
clearly originating in the West African Savannah. For Samuel Floyd, it is
specific techniques of call and response.
In adopting this focus, Floyd's The Power of Black Music utilizes a spe-
cific theoretical model, that of "Signifyin(g)," 6 and the way it is manifested
in music, through historicized adaptations of the "ring shout" realized as
call-response textures:
A twelve-bar blues in which a two-measure instrumental "response"
answers a two-measure vocal "call" is a classic example of Signifyin(g).
Here, the instrument performs a kind of sonic mimicry that creates the
illusion of speech or narrative conversation. When performers of gospel
music, for example, begin a new phrase while the other musicians are
only completing the first, they may be Signifyin(g) on what is occurring
and on what is to come, through implication and anticipation ... it is
sheer, wilful play - a dynamic interplay of music and aesthetic power, the
power to control and manipulate the musical circumstance.
(Floyd 1995: 96)
1 1 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues and gospel music
This represents a more subtle example of the over-riding influence these
genres have had on popular music - not only have they exerted stylistic
influence, but recent interpretations suggest that the very practice of bor-
rowing material from earlier songs and thereby commenting upon them
has become internalized within popular music practice.
This Companion attempts to learn from both the strengths, and what
contemporary scholarship would regard as deficiencies, in some of the po-
sitions outlined above. Following this introduction, Jeff Todd Titon takes
issue with the very stylistic labels we have become used to, and which I
have simply employed above, in order to show how they do not necessarily
articulate the most accurate way to represent the music. In so doing, we are
reminded that our understanding is always only provisional. This is followed
by outline histories of each genre, viewed as sufficient in their own right:
both Don Cusic and David Evans provide fairly unproblematic histories of
gospel and the blues respectively, outlining the current state of knowledge
of their development. This follows from the need, in any historical discus-
sion, to be able to place periods of change and stability against each other,
chronologically, and to gain a sense of both central and marginalized issues
at particular times.
We then switch focus to more specific details of the blues and gospel.
Graeme M. Boone takes twelve recordings, choosing as varied a range of
material as possible, and provides a detailed discussion of pertinent features
of each: in this, they can at least address those questions of detail which
are important across the field. Six of these are blues, six gospel (including
a comparison of three versions of "Take my hand, Precious Lord"). Audi-
ences do, after all, recognize blues and gospel songs through hearing them,
by noting certain sonic features. Through these discussions we are intro-
duced to some of the key musical decisions performers make. Steve Tracy
then explores the conditions under which the makers of these genres have
had to operate, using their own words where possible, acknowledging that
such an understanding becomes more secure the closer we can pay heed to
those intimately involved.
The three subsequent chapters focus on the genres by way of the most
notable instrumental forces employed: the voice, the guitar, and keyboard
instruments (complete coverage of all instruments is impossible in the space
available) . Vital here, then, that the writers are also professional performers -
a rare commodity. Both these genres being fundamentally vocal, the voice is
necessarily privileged. Barb Jungr provides a detailed discussion of the ways
we can focus on the "how" of singers' performances, to get closer as listeners
to understanding the effect these voices have on us. Matt Backer and Adrian
York then discuss the development of these genres from the perspectives of
the guitar and piano, calling attention to particular details of pattern and
12 Allan Moore
articulation. We then return to the voice, but through discussion of the
lyrics that such voices articulate. Guido van Rijn's chapter, which focuses on
the lyrics employed in particular key collections, acknowledges that this is a
greatly under- researched area of scholarship, and his chapter suggests some
norms to inform further research. The final chapter returns to the historical
stage, beginning from the view that the histories of the separate genres
require contextualization within an understanding of the role the blues and
gospel have played in the development of popular music generally. In its
entirety, that issue is too generalized for this collection, and it is in any case
addressed in readily available histories of popular music. Dave Headlam's
chapter specifically focuses on the ways these genres have at various times
"crossed over" from their core markets in order to reach larger audiences,
asking what has been lost or gained in such transactions.
2 Labels: identifying categories of blues and gospel
JEFF TODD TITON
Entering the world of blues and gospel music literature is like entering a
botanical garden: nomenclature is everywhere. Singers' nicknames intrigue:
Gatemouth Brown, Big Time Sarah, Lazy Bill Lucas, Mojo Buford, Bumble
Bee Slim, The Devil's Son-in-Law, Cow Cow Davenport, Blind Lemon
Jefferson, Blues Boy King, Driftin' Slim, Honeyboy Edwards, Howlin' Wolf,
Muddy Waters - the list goes on and on. Names of blues songs suggest
real and imagined worlds: "The Gone Dead Train," "Judge Harsh Blues,"
"Tim Moore's Farm," "Rough Dried Woman," "Don't Lose Your Eye,"
"Bye Bye Bird," and "Money, Marbles and Chalk," to name but a few.
Perhaps more pertinent to this book, a formidable terminology classifies
blues and gospel music according to style, genre, period, and geographical
location. Promising mastery and control, these labels conceal a good deal
of confusion and misleading information. On the other hand, without
labels it is difficult to discuss music - or anything else - in its historical,
geographical, and formal aspects.
Names exert control. An anecdote concerning the provenance of gospel
music will reveal the stakes involved in naming. George Nierenberg, the
filmmaker who conceived, shot, and edited Say Amen Somebody (1983),
the best-known documentary film about African American gospel music,
had asked me to be a consultant, to suggest ideas for filming, and to review
footage. Looking over the rough cut, an early edited version, I directed
a comment toward the inevitable historical section, suggesting that he
provide something about the origin and early development of the term
"gospel hymn," particularly in the last few decades of the nineteenth century
as a descriptor of a genre of religious music composed by white Americans
such as Fanny Crosby (1820-1915), and made widely popular in mass
religious revival meetings by Ira Sankey. Ultimately he determined that
inserting a historically accurate definition of gospel music would, in this
film context, be too confusing for the general audience. For political con-
siderations, then, the place of gospel song in music history is problematic
from the very start. No one except Charles Keil has ever seriously suggested
that white Americans invented blues music but, because it is in blues where
terminology really bristles, I will leave off commenting on gospel music,
and from here on confine myself to blues.
14 Jeff Todd Titon
Nomenclature organizes contemporary thinking about blues among
listeners, record collectors, and researchers. Consider the labels in guide-
books about blues. The chapters in The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Blues
(1991) are titled according these historical, stylistic, and geographical cat-
egories: "Songsters and Proto-Blues," "Early Deep South and Mississippi
Valley Blues," "Texas and the East Coast," "'Classic' Blues and Women
Singers," "Piano Blues and Boogie- Woogie," "The 1930s and Library of
Congress," "Rhythm and Blues," "Postwar Chicago and the North," "Down-
Home Postwar Blues," "Postwar Texas and the West Coast," "Louisiana, New
Orleans, and Zydeco," and "Soul Blues and Modern Trends." A similar list
of titles organizes the blues section of The New Grove Gospel, Blues and
Jazz (1980): "Origins," "From Songsters to Blues Singers," "Publication
and Recording," "Classic Blues," "Southern Folk Blues," "String, Jug, and
Washboard Bands," "Piano Blues and the Northern Migration," "Southern
Blues in the 1930s," "Urban Blues in the 1930s," "Postwar Blues on the
West Coast," "Postwar Chicago," "Soul Blues," "Research and Rediscovery,"
"White Blues," "Zydeco," "Composition," "Form and Content," "Music and
Techniques." The more recent books reflect increasing acceptance of diver-
sity. Blues for Dummies (1998) divides "the many shades of blues" into the
following styles: Classic Female Blues, Jump Blues, Country Blues, Piano
Blues, British Blues, Modern Electric Blues, Modern Acoustic Blues, Rhythm
& Blues, and Soul Blues. The same book also classifies the following "regional
blues styles": Chicago blues, Delta blues, Memphis blues, Texas blues, West
Coast blues, Louisiana blues, and New Orleans blues. The All Music Guide
to the Blues (1999) offers the same labels, no doubt because blues writer Cub
Koda had a hand in them both. But in the All Music Guide Koda offers a few
additional style categories: Jug Bands, Piedmont Blues, Harmonica Blues,
Songsters, Texas Electric Blues, Blues Slide Guitar, Jazz-Blues Crossover,
Blues Rediscoveries, and Blues Rock.
Behind the geographical labels lie older anthropological notions of
closed, isolated peasant communities. The idea is that because musicians
living close to each other learn from one another, musical communities
develop in which ideas and musical style are shared. Styles and genres in
musical communities are said to take on different casts depending on the
communities' degree of isolation and the inventiveness and influence of
master musicians within each of them. Yet regarding blues the truth is more
complex than this model suggests. Musicians were among the most mobile
African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, and many of the
most influential left their mark on the musics of many communities, not just
one. Some of them, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, toured on the black the-
atre circuit. Others, like Robert Johnson and Roosevelt Sykes, traveled more
informally, but just as influentially. At the same time, some outstanding blues
15 Labels: identifying categories of blues and gospel
musicians, such as Charley Patton, did stay more or less within the same
geographical area, where their influence was largely confined. Population
centers, such as Chicago, Memphis, and St. Louis, attracted a variety of black
musicians; the music that developed in these places reflected not a single
style but many, based on the diversity of the musicians who passed through.
In addition, the marketing of African American blues recordings, beginning
in the 1920s, via newspaper ads in the Chicago Defender (which circulated
widely in the South), made it possible for people in one part of the nation
to clip coupons and order records made by artists whom they had never
seen. Youngsters like Robert Johnson, born in the early part of the twentieth
century, were influenced, via recordings, by musicians, musical genres, and
styles that had originated and developed well outside of their local commu-
nities. Johnson, regarded by many as the most outstanding representative
of the great Mississippi Delta Blues tradition carried by Charley Patton, Son
House, Willie Brown, Muddy Waters, and others, was in fact more of an
innovator than a tradition-bearer. Nonetheless, as David Evans points out
in his essay for this volume, certain broad regional tendencies within vocal
and instrumental techniques are apparent in the history of blues, while it
is also clear that particularly influential musicians, such as Muddy Waters,
inspired imitators in many communities.
Besides specific geographical labels, the terms "city blues," "country
blues," "urban blues," and "rural blues" will be encountered. These terms
attempt to mark significant differences between pre-World War II blues
(country, rural) and post-World War II blues (city, urban). The actual
differences have more to do with instrumentation than geography. The
Second World War was the dividing line between acoustic and electric ins-
truments. The country bluesman was pictured as a solo performer, singing
and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar; the city or urban blues singer
was pictured with a band. In the pre-war period this band was the small jazz
combo that accompanied women blues singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie
Smith. In the 1930s and early 1940s it became the R.C.A. Bluebird house
blues band accompanying singers like Big Bill Broonzy and John Lee "Sonny
Boy" Williamson, and finally in the post-war era the band was understood
to play electronically amplified instruments. Later, "urban" came to refer
to a larger post-war band with a jazz instrumentation. The prototypical
post-war city blues band could be found in Chicago, with one or two
electric guitars, an electric bass, a piano, and an amplified harmonica. The
prototypical urban blues band was B. B. King's or T-Bone Walker's, without
the harmonica (a rural remnant) but with a saxophone or even a horn
section.
These classifications do not always hold. Country blues was sung and
played in cities and by people who grew up there. City blues was played in
16 Jeff Todd Titon
the rural areas. Lightnin' Hopkins, for example, was regarded as a country
bluesman; his 1959 debut album for Folkways presented him as a folk blues
singer, accompanied by his acoustic guitar. Samuel Charters, who recorded
him, waxed romantic in the album notes, calling Hopkins the one of the
last living exponents of country blues. Ironically, when Charters found him,
Hopkins had a career singing blues and playing electric guitar in Houston,
sometimes solo and sometimes with a drummer or harmonica player or bass
player. Hopkins had also been prolific in the recording studio in this city
blues style, with hundreds of commercial blues 78s to his credit in the dozen
or so years after World War II. Today Hopkins is recognized for what he was,
an outstanding composer of lyrics, an average guitarist, moody, humorous,
and an important regional figure in the history of blues. Whether he was a
country or city bluesman does not seem important.
A glance at the labels in the most recent blues guides reveals the
increasing attention paid to modern blues, particularly blues performed
outside the community of its origin: that is, performed by and for non-
African Americans. The earliest writers on blues took note of the music's
popularity among whites in the 1910s and 1920s, and some pointed to the
few hillbilly recording artists who incorporated blues into their repertoires.
These included Frank Hutchinson, Dock Boggs, Sam and Kirk McGee, the
"father" of bluegrass, Bill Monroe and, importantly, the first real star of
country music, Jimmie Rodgers. But most blues researchers understood
that roughly until the 1950s and the era of the Civil Rights movement, blues
was a music of the African American underclass: they had invented it, nur-
tured it, and popularized it primarily in their own communities. Given this
history, combined with prevailing notions about authenticity, white blues
was considered derivative and inauthentic. Indeed, for some audiences of
an older folkloristic persuasion, along with a fairly strict definition of blues
along formal lines, modern electric blues was suspect: it sounded too much
like rock'n'roll. That feeling prompted Charters to view, and represent,
Lightnin' Hopkins as a country bluesman. European audiences in the 1950s
enjoyed the acoustic blues of Big Bill Broonzy, but the electric guitar, electric
bass, and amplified harmonica in Muddy Waters' band was not widely
appreciated. Waters, of course, preferred the powerful, electric sound, as
he (and the recording company he was with, Chess Records) were hoping
to score some hits on the rock'n'roll charts. By the mid-1960s, however,
resistance to electric blues was disappearing in the wake of the sheer
popularity of the amplified sound among a new, young adult audience; and
like moths to a flame, white musicians were drawn to playing the blues, first
in Britain and then in the United States. (Their efforts at singing were not
as convincing.) For example, the label "British Blues" in Blues for Dummies
and The All Music Guide to Blues refers to the English blues bands of the
17 Labels: identifying categories of blues and gospel
1960s such as The Rolling Stones (who took their name from a Muddy
Waters blues song and whose early albums contain cover versions of 1950s
Chicago blues), John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and Cream, the last two
featuring guitarist Eric Clapton. The subsequent popularity of these British
bands in the United States brought the blues into U.S. rock music, with
the result that some enormously popular rock bands were essentially blues
bands (e.g., Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company; Led
Zeppelin) while rock lead guitar style evolved through blues into the "heavy
metal" genre so popular during the 1970s and 1980s. Thus the "blues rock"
label is important in the aforementioned contemporary guides to blues,
and it (and British blues) refers chiefly to white musicians such as The
Allman Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, and Stevie
Ray Vaughan. "Soul blues," on the other hand, is a code term that refers
to African American musicians whose blues style and approach reflects
the gospel-influenced soul music that arose in the 1960s with Ray Charles,
James Brown, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and other black singers and
musicians. Purveyors of soul blues include Bobby "Blue" Bland, Junior
Parker, Albert King, Z. Z. Hill, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, and Robert Cray
The classificatory taxonomy one encounters in the botanical garden
groups plants by similar characteristics; the labels thus aid in making the
generalizations needed to discuss form, function, origins, and evolution in
the plant world. The early blues enthusiasts who created the various genre,
style, geographical, and period labels were not merely trying to organize
their record collections; they hoped that this taxonomy would aid discus-
sions of the historical development and geographical diffusion of blues,
including, perhaps, a path toward discovering blues origins. The extent to
which this has been successful may be seen in David Evans' essay in this
volume, which is as good an overview of the origins, characteristics, and
early development of blues as can be written by a historian at this point in
time. But a discussion of labels in blues and gospel music needs to attend
not only to the labels that collectors, journalists, critics, researchers, and
scholars use in their discussions of the music, but also to how the musicians
themselves label it. Here we enter a different world, one of looser definitions
and more practical distinctions.
I well recall my first extensive companionship with a blues musician.
Lazy Bill Lucas was born in Arkansas, sang and played blues guitar and piano
professionally in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, and moved to Minneapolis
where he continued performing and where I met him in 1965 when I first
began my graduate studies. Bill had grown up in a black sharecropping
family; he learned music at an early age; as a youngster he and his family
migrated north along the Mississippi. Bill apprenticed himself to legendary
blues musicians such as Big Joe Williams, and as a young man to Big Bill
18 Jeff Todd Titon
Broonzy; he was a blues vocalist, guitarist, and pianist in Chicago during
the golden years, the time of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf - indeed,
he got there before they did. After a modest recording career, he moved to
Minneapolis and led a blues band there, one that I later joined. What was
Bill's perspective on blues? What labels and categories did he use?
Interestingly, he didn't use very many labels at all. "Delta blues," "East
Coast blues," "pre-war blues," "post-war blues" - these terms held no mean-
ing to him and he did not use them. One day he and his friend, the bass
player Jo Jo Williams, were sitting in Bill's apartment talking about the older
blues, perhaps in response to my interest in it. Jo Jo was reminiscing about
his youth in the Mississippi Delta, and how he used to go to listen to Charlie
Patton and Willie Brown. He used the term "downhome blues" to refer
to their music. I asked what he meant by that. Bill answered first. "Down
South, on the farm," is what the term meant to Bill. Jo Jo expanded on Bill's
definition: "The word downhome, it mean back to the root, which mean
where it all start at, this music, the blues and the church music, and so far
as I can understand, it came from the country, the fields and the shacks and
the towns that weren't but wide spaces in the highway." For Bill and Jo Jo,
"downhome" was a fusion of geography with history, memory, and feeling.
It occurred to me then that "downhome" was a more evocative term than
"country" and I determined to adopt it in my own writings (see Titon 1990
and 1995).
Geographical style marking was important to Bill Lucas as a class dis-
criminator, also - something that blues researchers seldom dealt with. He
made a stylistic distinction between blues that was from "way back in the
country" and blues that he called "sophisticated." For him, these musical
styles evoked different ways of life based on wealth and opportunity. Bill
never had the opportunity to learn sophisticated music. "I guess I'll just
have to stick with the old funky blues," he used to say.
As an entertainer he could, and did, play music that blues historians
call pre-war, post-war, Chicago, jump, r&b, and soul music. He mixed it
all up in his live performances. He might follow Bessie Smith's "I Had a
Dream" with Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" (an r&b hit from the 1950s
that saw much airplay on white stations) or Ray Charles' "Should I Ever Love
Again." In his set selection he was always mixing categories, I thought. If he
viewed them as labels, they were markers, not boundaries. The distinction
is critical. Conceived as boundaries, the labels do not work; they are too
porous. As markers, blues and gospel labels point to commonalities in such
characteristics as form (for example, twelve-bar blues), in style ( jump blues),
and in combinations involving style, time period, and geography (Memphis
jug bands in the 1920s).
19 Labels: identifying categories of blues and gospel
None of this is to say that blues musicians' judgments are infallible
or that they should automatically be granted authority by virtue of their
experiences. Bluesmen, like scholars, can be stupefyingly wrong in their
theories. One young blues singer maintained, on the basis of research among
his elders, that the original name for blues was "reals" because blues told the
truth. A few researchers believed this story and it has gained some currency.
Apparently, though, the singer had been told the fact that musicians played
"reels" (dance tunes) before blues. Not knowing the label "reels," he heard
it as "reals" and made the imaginative leap. Moreover, by now the better-
known blues musicians have been interviewed almost to death, they have
exchanged stories and ideas about blues at countless festivals, and as a result
of this exposure they have become familiar with many of the labels that
record collectors, journalists, and other researchers have attached to the
music. Robert Jr. Lockwood, on hearing that I would interview him at a
blues festival ten years ago, challenged me by saying he didn't think I could
ask him a question he hadn't been asked before. I said I wondered if he
would give me an answer I hadn't heard before, and he laughed. A good
conversation and some good music followed.
3 The development of the blues
DAVID EVANS
Between 1890 and 1910 new sounds - melodic, instrumental, and verbal -
began to penetrate the repertoire of African American music hitherto domi-
nated by spirituals, functional songs of work and play, narrative folk ballads,
banjo tunes, and fast-paced instrumental dance music. Drawing from all
these older forms, as well as the simultaneously emerging ragtime and
jazz, these sounds coalesced fully by the end of this period to the point
where they could be recognized as a distinct genre of music called the blues.
This new music conveyed a remarkable sense of immediacy, purporting
to express the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the singer as well as
the spontaneous inventions and variations of musicians at the moment of
performance. Yet for all of its immediacy, blues as a whole had a power of
endurance that would sustain it throughout the twentieth century and see it
at the end of that century as a major form of popular music with worldwide
appeal.
Contemporary reports and later recollections of blues during this early
period place the music in rural areas, small towns, and cities throughout
the South, especially the "Deep South" from east Texas to central Georgia
and the Carolina Piedmont region, the land where cotton was king. Blues
appear to have been rarer or non-existent along the Atlantic and Gulf
Coasts and in older settled regions such as Virginia or areas such as the
Appalachian Mountains where the population was overwhelmingly white.
From the Deep South blues flowed along arteries of commerce and trans-
portation, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and the various railroad lines
stretching northward and westward. Early centers of blues activity were
rural areas containing large plantations worked mainly by sharecroppers,
such as the Mississippi Delta, lowland regions of adjacent states, the river
bottoms of southeast Texas, the turpentine, railroad, mining and levee
camps, and the cities of both the South and the North that were filling up
with migrants from these rural areas. People were newly arrived or preparing
to leave, working on temporary or seasonal jobs or in migrant occupations,
moving every year or two from one plantation to another, trying their luck in
the city or returning to a more predictable existence on the farm. Blues also
thrived among hobos and hustlers in the underworld of gambling, moon-
shining, and prostitution, and among the people floating in and out of
prisons. This population was essentially a mobile labor force, cut off from
21 The development of the blues
the certainties of the ante-bellum plantation, having little or no formal
education, competing with white immigrant laborers, and desperately try-
ing to make a living and find a safe harbor from racial harassment. Blues
had less appeal for those who were able to hold onto farms that their fami-
lies had established during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War
(1861-65), for the religious segment of the black population who viewed
the blues as sinful, or for the upwardly mobile and educated class. But for
those who supported the blues, it was their music for dance and recreation,
humor, philosophy, courtship, even at times approaching the status of a
religious cult and a way of life. For its performers it could become their
means of making a living.
The hopes of Reconstruction and its promise of integration of the freed
slaves into the mainstream of American society were dashed in a late
nineteenth-century backlash of disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and
strict segregation. Lynching reached its peak in the 1890s and remained for
another three-quarters of a century the ultimate threat against any asser-
tion of black dignity, power, or aspiration. This threat fell hardest on the
children of the freed slaves, the first generation to grow up in a freedom
that turned out to be not really free, cut off from their parents' experiences,
resented by the southern whites who had lost the Civil War, and denied any
real opportunity for advancement in American life. With its social institu-
tions under siege, a sense of individualism grew in the black community, and
this is reflected in blues and the other new musical forms that arose at this
time in the form of solo performance or increased soloing within ensem-
bles, virtuoso improvisation, and increased competition among musicians
leading to "cutting contests" and "carving." Individualism, of course, was a
growing factor in white society at this time, related to industrial competi-
tion, but for whites it often became a vehicle for opportunity and success.
For blacks it was a matter of survival.
The blues genre
Several characteristics of early blues became the genre's identifying features.
One of these was the use of seemingly ambivalent "blue notes" at certain
points in the scale (see Chapter 5). Blues players and singers also tended
to improvise and vary their melodic lines, instrumental parts and lyrics,
and to experiment with sound quality, using growling, screaming, wailing,
and falsetto singing and the muffling, snapping, sliding, and bending of
notes. This spontaneous quality created the impression that the thoughts,
feelings, and expressions of the moment were quite important, turning at-
tention away from the song as product of a deliberate and often arduous
22 David Evans
process of composition, toward the performance itself and the personality
and uniqueness of the performer. Blues also elevated the role of the musi-
cal instrument within popular song, making it a second voice, integral to
the song itself, punctuating, commenting upon, and answering the vocal
line. Early in its development blues became especially associated with the
twelve-bar, three-line AAB pattern, which seemed to lend an asymmetrical
quality to the blues. Finally, blues introduced to popular song a new frank-
ness, breadth of subject matter, and assertiveness. The songs demanded to
be taken seriously, thus causing their singers and the subculture they repre-
sented to be taken seriously as well. Blues were distinctly secular and worldly,
unsentimental, sexually explicit, and ironic, with an undertone of deep dis-
satisfaction. All these characteristics were new or unusual within popular
American music, often contradicting established rules of Western musical
form and performance style as well as popular stereotypes and expectations
of black music. Often they shocked the musical, social, and moral sensibil-
ities of those outside the culture, yet this new music had within it a strange
fascination that demanded attention and caused it to influence almost all
developments in American popular music of the twentieth century as well
as much of the rest of the world's music. Ultimately blues would outlast
many of the genres and styles that it influenced.
Although blues emerged as distinctly new, it developed from older types
of music. Much of its vocal material is derived from the "hollers" of lone
workers. These songs were generally free flowing, melismatic, spontaneous
expressions set to pentatonic tunes containing blue notes, commenting on
the work situation itself or the singer's love life. There were also types of solo
religious expression, prayers and sermons, with a similar musical structure.
Most blues singers were exposed to these types of work song and religious
expression early in life and were able to adapt some of the melodic character,
subject matter, emotional intensity, and spiritual depth of these songs to the
developing blues. But blues generally had a more rigid structure than these
unaccompanied songs, for blues was a vocal and instrumental genre that
often served as music for dancing. The formal mold that gave shape to
this loose vocalizing came largely from folk ballads. The ballad was an
old European form of narrative song well established in southern Anglo-
American folk tradition, which blacks began to adapt soon after Emancipa-
tion. Increasingly blacks began performing ballads to the accompaniment of
banjo, guitar, or other instruments at fast tempos for dancing. They created
original songs on such characters as "John Henry" the railroad worker or
"Jesse James" the outlaw. Black balladry reached its peak of popularity and
creativity in the period 1890-1910 as the blues genre was developing. By this
time almost all these ballads celebrated characters who acted outside the law
and organized society or who were in some way bold and "bad." Many of
23 The development of the blues
these new ballads proved popular with white singers, who learned them from
black musicians in work camps, waterfront dives, gambling dens, and bor-
dellos, and began composing similar songs themselves. Many of these songs
(such as "Stagolee," "Frankie and Albert," "The Boll Weevil," and "Railroad
Bill") used a three-line form consisting of a rhymed couplet followed by a
one-line refrain. The couplet lines were roughly in iambic heptameter verse.
The three lines began respectively with tonic, subdominant, and dominant
harmonies, by the end usually resolving to the tonic. The emerging blues
genre borrowed this structure, reducing the length of all of the lines to a
rough iambic pentameter to leave space at the end for an instrumental re-
sponse, converting the textual pattern to AAB, often slowing the tempo in
order to make the songs more suitable for the increasingly popular couple
dances such as the "slow drag," and changing the thematic focus from third-
person tales of "bad" men and women to first-person statements in which
the singer was the protagonist. Not all early blues conformed to the twelve-
bar form: two-line (eight-bar) and four-line (sixteen-bar) blues drew from
other forms of ballads and social songs or represented contractions or ex-
pansions of the three-line form. Some blues lines had their length extended
by repeated short melodic-rhythmic phrases or "riffs." Much older black in-
strumental dance music, played on fiddles, banjos, and other instruments,
was structured on the riff idea, from where it entered the blues.
The blues amalgamated various elements derived ultimately from
European and African musical traditions, although they are above all prod-
ucts of their time, place, and sociocultural conditions and contain other
elements that are distinctly American and original. In general, the European
elements tend to be formal, and they are usually modified or transformed
through the influence of African stylistic characteristics. The iambic pen-
tameter, for example, is familiar from Renaissance authors and may have
been absorbed by blues singers through their often limited schooling. But
a line like "I got the blues and can't be satisfied" would never be sung by a
blues singer in this strictly metrical manner. Instead, its accents would be dis-
placed, giving life and strength to syllables and words that would otherwise
have a weak impact on the listener. This sort of improvisational variation is
typical of African singing, which rarely corresponds to set poetic metrical
patterns. In most blues, in fact, this metrical structure has become unrec-
ognizable. The harmonic sequences are also typically European, but the
subdominant and dominant harmonies are often only partially expressed
or merely suggested by a single note, and melody and harmony are typically
drawn back to the tonic at the end of each line, reasserting the essentially
African modal character of this music. Blues performers often subvert the
twelve-bar pattern with its standard harmonies rather than reinforce it. The
main instruments of blues music - guitar, piano, harmonica, along with
24 David Evans
violin, mandolin, string bass, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, and the drum
set - are all of Western manufacture, but blues players have found ways of
creating percussive effects, bent notes, and other sounds on these instru-
ments that were never intended for them but which spring from techniques
familiar in African music. Many secondary instruments of the blues - jug,
kazoo, washboard, washtub bass, and a one-stringed zither played with a
slide technique - are all derived from African prototype instruments, of-
ten preserved in American tradition as children's instruments until blues
put them to use. Many other basic characteristics of the blues are typically
African as well, including the call and response of voice and instrument, the
use of repeated riffs, flexibility of pitch, timbral variety, the mixing of tonal
and percussive sound qualities, and the use of instruments as voices. Songs
of social commentary, praise and derision, boasting and self-pity are also
common in many African traditions, and aspects of the lifestyle of blues
singers and the social position of the outsider can be observed in African
minstrel and griot traditions.
Blues appear originally to have been the expression of one voice and
one instrument - normally guitar, piano, or harmonica - all of which were
relatively new to black American music at the end of the nineteenth century.
Male singers usually played their own accompaniment, while female singers
more often had someone else, usually male, accompanying them. There is
much evidence for solo performance in the earliest reports of the blues, and
it remained common among black musicians through the 1950s, taking on
extended life since then through the international blues revival. Duets of
two guitars, guitar and harmonica, guitar and piano, and larger combos
of these and other instruments, variously known as jug, juke, washboard
or skiffle bands, emerged on recordings in the 1920s but are known to
have been in existence earlier. These larger combinations were especially
characteristic of urban centers, where musicians would band together in
order to make more money and compete with more polished and urbane
ensembles. As the blues form coalesced and gained popularity in the black
communities in the early years, it was also adopted by more established types
of groups, such as vocal quartets and string bands featuring fiddle, banjo,
or mandolin. Ragtime pianists began playing pieces in the blues form, and
dance bands adopted it, in the process beginning to transform themselves
into jazz bands. Traces of three-line blues strains show up in a number of
published piano rags before 1910, along with what appear to be attempts to
express blue notes in print. When jazz emerged on commercial recordings
from 1917, the number of blues tunes in the repertoires of the earliest
bands was truly remarkable. It goes without saying, of course, that much
of the essential improvisational and "hot" quality of jazz springs from the
blues.
25 The development of the blues
The earliest blues
From its very beginning blues was a commercial music. Many early per-
formers were paid entertainers at dances and minstrels playing for tips in
public places, but the money made in the earliest years was relatively small
change. No stars were especially associated with this music, and no perform-
ers had more than local fame. Furthermore, blues represented only a portion
of what they performed. In later recordings of some of the oldest-known
blues artists, those born in the 1870s and 1880s such as Henry Thomas,
Frank Stokes, and Lead Belly, we find many songs besides blues - ballads,
social dance tunes, ragtime and "coon" songs, and spirituals. These per-
formers needed music for all tastes and occasions. The name "blues" had
not yet been applied to a whole musical genre, and for many musicians and
audience members this music probably consisted of a handful of tunes that
constituted a small portion of a varied repertoire. Some of these tunes were
novel enough at the time to become widespread over much of the South,
songs such as "Poor Boy Long Way from Home," "Red River Blues," the
semi-narrative "Joe Turner," and the ragtime-like "Make Me a Pallet on the
Floor."
As blues began to be adopted by bands with some formal training (like
W. C. Handy's) and began to appear occasionally as odd strains in rag-
time tunes, the music was ready to take on a popular identity of its own.
This process of consolidation into a recognizable genre occurred between
1908 and 1914 through the appearance of published tunes bearing the word
"blues" in their titles and the representation of blues songs on the vaudeville
stage in southern black urban communities. Milestones in this process were
the 1908 New Orleans publication of Antonio Maggio's "I Got the Blues"
and the 1909 "I'm Alabama Bound," subtitled "The Alabama Blues," cred-
ited to white New Orleans theatre pianist Robert Hoffman. Although not
exactly in the twelve-bar format, it contains three-line verses with the lines
beginning respectively with tonic, subdominant, and dominant harmonies,
and typical blues subject matter in the lyrics. The song spread quickly and
soon developed variants like any folksong. It would take another three years
for a new wave of blues titles to be published. Meanwhile, southern black
vaudeville entertainers were adopting into their repertoires this and other
blues songs, some of them of their own composition, and enjoying audi-
ence success. By 191 1 performers like ventriloquist Johnnie Woods, pianists
Baby Seals and Kid Love, and vocalists Laura Smith and Estelle Harris were
gaining reputations as blues specialists and blues could regularly be heard
in theatres in the Tri- State Circuit centered in Memphis.
In 1912 four more blues tunes were published, "Dallas Blues" by
white Oklahoma City musician Hart A. Wand, "Baby Seals Blues" by the
26 David Evans
professional black vaudevillian and pianist, "The Memphis Blues" by black
Memphis band-leader W. C. Handy, and "The Negro Blues" by white min-
strel show performer Leroy "Lasses" White of Dallas. That whites were cred-
ited as the composers of two of these, as well as the two earlier tunes published
in 1908 and 1909, indicates that blues were sufficiently established to easily
reach southern white ears through performances by black street musicians
and bands hired to play for dances. More blues songs were published in the
next two years, including Handy 's "St. Louis Blues" in 1914, which became
one of the greatest hit songs of the twentieth century By this time, any
vaudeville singer in America, black or white, could easily acquire a blues
repertoire of several songs, even without any direct contact with the blues
environment.
While several prominent white vaudevillians during the 1910s had rep-
utations as delineators of Negro character in song, blues tunes constituted
only a small portion of their repertoires. Among black performers in the
South, however, the situation was different. Artists like Gertrude "Ma"
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Edna Benbow (later Hicks) increasingly spe-
cialized in blues material during this decade, and by its end there were
hundreds of black blues singers working in the professional circuit. Many
would become recording artists in the 1920s. Meanwhile, for those singers
unable to compose their own blues or obtain them from the folk tradition,
there was an increasing number of blues being published in sheet music
in both piano and orchestral arrangements. Two black-owned publishing
houses were particularly successful, that of Harry Pace and W. C. Handy
founded in Memphis in 1913 and that of Clarence Williams and A. J. Piron
founded in New Orleans in 1915. They published blues by their owners
as well as by other songwriters. Many of these tunes contained vestiges
of ragtime and popular song, including multiple musical strains, some of
which were not in a blues form, introductions, narrative story lines, exag-
gerated sentimentality and pathos, and stereotyped "coon" imagery. Some
were merely ragtime songs with a lot of blue notes. Nevertheless, they all
managed to convey some degree of blues sensibility, both musical and lyri-
cal. Increasingly the songs were composed for female singers, while males
involved in blues in the vaudeville scene turned more and more to the roles
of pianist and songwriter. This situation stood in contrast to that of the
folk communities, where the blues performers were predominantly male.
Guitar-playing blues singers remained conspicuously absent from this pro-
fessional scene, however, although they were probably the most common
type of blues performer in the small towns and rural areas of the South.
Between 1914 and 1920, for many Americans the blues appeared to be
a new type of ragtime song expressing a more realistic view of black life
and emotions and containing novel strains and inflections. When jazz burst
27 The development of the blues
onto the scene in 1917, shifting the focus of interest toward the performer's
momentary improvisations, the new musical stylists featured many blues
tunes. Audiences could now viewblues as a type of jazz. The problem was that
few Americans except for blacks and southern whites had heard authentic
blues. White society bands recorded blues, as did white jazz bands following
the initial 1917 success of New Orleans' Original Dixieland Jazz Band. A few
black bands recorded blues in the wake of the jazz craze, including those of
Handy, Wilbur Sweatman, and James Europe, but these were units of highly
trained musicians whose backgrounds were in ragtime, ballroom dance
music, military bands, and circus and minstrel show music. This music was
for them essentially something to be exploited as a trend in popular music.
Whether it was viewed as ragtime, jazz, or a separate genre mattered little.
Early blues recordings
In 1920 the first vocal blues by a black singer was released on a phonograph
record. The artist was Mamie Smith, a veteran of the vaudeville and cabaret
circuit, and the song was "Crazy Blues," composed by black songwriter
Perry Bradford, who also led the band that backed the singer and helped to
manage her career. The tune was arranged in the manner of a popular song,
but it contained a blues strain. The lyrics told in a rather melodramatic
way how the singer's man had left her, causing her to go crazy and in the
end get high on "hop" and shoot a policeman: it sold phenomenally well.
Other record companies, all of them based in or near New York, followed
the lead of Mamie Smith's company, Okeh, and signed up blues talent for
recording. "Crazy Blues" established something of a formula that would
be used for the next few years: a female star drawn from the northern
vaudeville or cabaret scene or working in a current stage show, performing
a song by a male professional songwriter (who might also be her pianist,
band leader, manager, or husband), accompanied by a five- to eight-piece
jazz band. Many of the songs contained multiple strains, not all of them
in a blues form, and most were complaints about no-good men. These
singers (the most important being Mamie Smith, Lucille Hegamin, Trixie
Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, Lizzie Miles, and Edith Wilson) were
professional entertainers, some of them dancers and actresses as well, for
whom blues was just part of their repertoire. Few wrote many of their own
songs.
In the early 1920s most blues records by black artists were released in the
regular popular series by such companies as Okeh, Columbia, Arto, Bell,
Pathe, Paramount, and the black-owned Black Swan. These records were
generally available to white buyers, although the majority of purchasers were
28 David Evans
black. Realizing this, and attempting to expand their major customer base,
the companies by 1923 established series of "race records" of blues, gospel,
and jazz music to be marketed almost exclusively in black communities and
advertised in black newspapers. Most white consumers thus became cut
off from records by black artists except for those by jazz figures with the
broadest mass appeal like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. From this
point onward, however, blues records became progressively more bluesy. In
1 923 a new wave of female singers from the southern vaudeville circuit began
to record, and other companies like Victor, Vocalion, Brunswick, Ajax, and
Gennett got into the race recording business. Some of these singers like
Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox, composed a good bit of their own
material, and more of their songs employed a single twelve-bar strain with
variations. Most were now accompanied not by a full jazz band but by a
pianist, sometimes with one or two other instruments such as trumpet,
trombone, clarinet, or banjo, using leading soloists from the jazz world,
although some (Smith, Rainey, Sara Martin) were occasionally accompanied
on record just by one or two guitarists, a banjo player, a guitar and fiddle,
or a small jug band.
Themes of these songs were more realistic, and lyrics and tunes drew
more from folk sources. Paramount, Gennett, Brunswick, and Vocalion
began making recordings at Chicago and other midwestern studios, drawing
on the local and regional talent base that was generally closer to blues sources
than that of New York. Okeh Records even made field trips to Atlanta in 1923,
followed by further trips to St. Louis and New Orleans. Most of these new
singers (Lucille Bogan, Clara Smith, Viola McCoy, Bertha "Chippie" Hill,
Sara Martin, Sippie Wallace, Rosa Henderson, Victoria Spivey) had rougher
voices than the first wave of recording artists and sounded more comfortable
handling blue notes. Man /woman duos also began to record, including
such veteran vaudeville acts as George Williams and Bessie Brown, Leola B.
and Kid Wesley Wilson, and Butterbeans and Susie. Most of their songs
were original stage routines set to bluesy ragtime tunes and dealing with
the battle of the sexes. There are recordings of a few solo male performers,
mostly from the vaudeville scene, such as female impersonator and yodeler
Charles Anderson, New Orleans singing banjoist Papa Charlie Jackson, one-
man-band Hezekiah Jenkins playing guitar and harmonica, and Louisville
guitarist Sylvester Weaver who also played on some of Sara Martin's records.
A few came from the juke houses and streets, such as Atlanta twelve-string
guitarist Ed Andrews and one-man-band Daddy Stovepipe.
The artist who broke open the recording field for male self-accompanied
solo blues singers was a guitar-playing street singer from Dallas named Blind
Lemon Jefferson. Recording in Chicago around the beginning of 1926, he
sang elaborate blues melodies in a vocal range that stretched to two octaves,
29 The development of the blues
and played extended single-note runs on the guitar, displaying a seemingly
inexhaustible supply of improvisational ideas performed with amazing vir-
tuosity. At first he relied largely on traditional blues lyrics in constructing
his songs, but by 1928 he was displaying more lyric originality and a rare
compositional skill. Jefferson's records sold widely, and he served as a role
model of success and the standard of musical excellence for many other
singer-guitarists. His playing anticipated by about fifteen years the impro-
visational single-note style of electric lead guitarists of the early 1940s, such
as Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, who as a child used to lead Jefferson around on
the streets of Dallas. Another influential singer-guitarist, whose recording
career began around the same time, was Lonnie Johnson, originally from
New Orleans but relocated to St. Louis. Johnson came from a more sophisti-
cated musical world than Jefferson, being equally adept on violin and piano
and comfortable performing in vaudeville theatres and with jazz musicians.
As spectacular a musician as Jefferson, he served as another role model and
influence to aspiring guitarists and blues singers. Both artists were known
for bending strings in their playing and have been cited as influences by
B. B. King and other later electric blues guitarists.
Two factors contributed to the success of Jefferson and Johnson and
artists like them who recorded in subsequent years. One was the invention
of the electrical recording process, which came into general use in 1925.
The use of a microphone enabled records to convey a wider frequency range
of sound, reducing surface noise and allowing regional accents and rough
voices (as well as light voices and instruments such as guitars and pianos)
to be heard better. The second was the decision by many of the compa-
nies to record away from their main studios located in northern cities.
Electrical recording equipment was lighter in weight, more portable, and
less sensitive to environmental variables. Record companies were facing in-
creased competition from radio, which seemed to provide unlimited free
entertainment, whereas records typically cost 75 cents for six minutes of
music. The companies had to find new markets, and one of these was the
audience for blues by black performers, who hardly ever appeared on radio
(a situation that prevailed with only a few exceptions up to the end of the
1940s). The success of Jefferson and Johnson indicated that there was a
market for southern blues straight from the barrelhouses, street corners,
and house parties. Although Okeh Records had been making a few field ses-
sions as early as 1923, the companies started this practice in earnest in 1926:
Atlanta, Dallas, and Memphis were favorite locations up to 1931. Sessions
lasted a few days to a couple of weeks in rented hotel rooms, auditori-
ums, or office buildings, and gospel music, sermons, jazz, country music,
ethnic music, and more mainstream popular music were also recorded. The
audience for downhome blues could be reached through advertisements
30 David Evans
in the black press and distribution networks reaching to music and fur-
niture stores in black urban neighborhoods, even to southern plantation
commissaries.
Blues with guitar or piano
Between 1926 and 1931 a large number of solo guitar playing blues singers
were recorded in both the northern and the temporary southern studios
by over a half dozen record companies. Besides lefferson and Johnson, they
included Henry Thomas, Furry Lewis, Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy
Johnson, Ishman Bracey, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Barbecue Bob,
Peg Leg Howell, Blind Willie McTell and Blind Blake, almost all born in the
1 890s or early 1 900s. About half of them also recorded folkballads, spirituals,
minstrel and ragtime tunes, and other older material, but many concentrated
almost entirely on blues: after about a quarter century of development blues
music was enough to sustain the musical interests and careers of plenty of
performers. This situation would prevail for the remainder of the twentieth
century.
Enough singer-guitarists were recorded in this era that it is possible to
categorize most in terms of three regionally differentiated approaches to
blues performance style. One of these encompasses East Texas and adjacent
portions of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Here the melodic lines are
often wide ranging and free flowing, almost like field hollers. The guitar
pounds away with every beat on a single muffled note or group of notes in
the bass, while free-flowing and seemingly improvised treble lines answer
the voice. Sometimes, in blues apparently designed more for listening than
for dancing, the guitar virtually drops out during the singing, only to come
back with a string of notes as a response. Blind Lemon Jefferson epitomized
this approach, which would prove to be influential on later electric guitarists
who would apply it to an ensemble format where other instruments could
be counted on to keep the beat and provide the harmonic background.
Another stylistic region might be called the Deep South, stretching from
the Mississippi Valley eastward to Central Georgia. Its heart was the Delta
region of northwest Mississippi, an area of large plantations and an over-
whelmingly black rural population where blues was intensely cultivated
along with the cotton crop. Blues from this region display the greatest in-
tensity of emotional feeling and seriousness of content, perhaps reflecting
the harshness of life there. The guitar playing tends to be very percussive,
with the slide style heard frequently, and many tunes are constructed from
repeated riffs. Melodies are often pentatonic, and harmonic development
is little emphasized. Singers rely heavily on a shared body of lyric verses
31 The development of the blues
and phrases in constructing their songs. Altogether, it is a stark, minimalist
approach to the blues, effective through its hypnotic power. It proved to be
very influential post- 1 945, when the guitar became electrified and harnessed
to the sound of a small ensemble that could reinforce the music's intensity.
The third blues region encompassed the East Coast from Florida to
Maryland, stretching westward through the Piedmont, the Appalachian
Mountains, and the Ohio River Valley to central Kentucky and Tennessee.
Here the influence of ragtime, popular music, and Anglo-American folk
music could be heard in the blues. Guitarists tended to play patterns of al-
ternating bass notes or an alternating bass note and chord, in the manner of
ragtime, with spectacular virtuoso playing in the treble range, featuring fre-
quent harmonic changes and passing notes and chords. The rhythms were
lighter, and most players adhered strictly to the twelve-bar or some other
standard format. It was in many respects the opposite of the Deep South
style. Some of its greatest exponents were blind or otherwise handicapped
musicians, fully professional in music on account of their disabilities. This
style reached its peak of development in the 1920s and 1930s and, perhaps
because of its textural and harmonic density, did not translate well into a
later electric and ensemble format.
During this period blues guitarists were also recorded in combinations
with other instruments. There were duos of two guitarists, such as Frank
Stokes and Dan Sane (the Beale Street Sheiks), or Memphis-based Memphis
Minnie and Kansas Joe (McCoy), and Tommy Johnson and Charlie McCoy
(Joe's brother) from Jackson, Mississippi. The Mississippi Sheiks were a
stripped- down string band of just guitar and fiddle, while Peg Leg Howell's
"Gang" from Atlanta consisted of two guitars and a fiddle. The Dallas String
Band used a mandolin, guitar, and string bass. Larger combos of three to
five musicians were especially found in the black urban communities and
were variously known as washboard or jug bands (from their emblematic
instruments), skiffle bands (derived from "scuffle" and suggesting their dif-
ficult musical existence), juke bands (from the juke house environment
where they often performed), and spasm bands (from their irregular and
impromptu pattern of performing and their use of "pick up" musicians).
They played in clubs, street corners, parks, serenading in residential neigh-
borhoods, on excursion boats and trains, at store openings and sales, and at
private parties in homes and hotels, and were popular with white as well as
black audiences. Jug bands were recorded in Memphis (Memphis Jug Band;
Cannon's Jug Stompers), Dallas, Birmingham, Cincinnati, and Louisville,
here often displaying a greater affinity for jazz and popular music sounds and
instrumentation. Walter Taylor's band from Kentucky consisted of guitar,
banjo, washboard, and kazoo, and there were other combinations of string,
wind, and percussion instruments recorded at this time. Although these
32 David Evans
bands recorded some ragtime and popular tunes, their main repertoire
was blues, and they can be viewed as the first real blues bands, containing
some of the elements in prototype form that would occur in more modern
ensembles.
Pianist- singer Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, based in
Indianapolis, took the lead in popularizing this type of duo which, from
1928, became another foundation of modern blues ensembles. Carr's plain-
tive singing was set to a full, rolling, rhythmic piano, with Blackwell's single-
note guitar lines cutting through like a knife. Blackwell played a steel-bodied
instrument, giving him added volume to match that of the piano. It became
an immensely popular and influential combination, spawning many imita-
tors and outlasting Carr's death in 1935. A variation on this set-up, one that
came to be known as "hokum" blues, was also created in 1928 by two mu-
sicians based in Chicago, pianist Thomas A. Dorsey ("Georgia Tom") and
guitarist Hudson Whitaker ("Tampa Red"). The latter also played a steel-
bodied guitar, often in the slide style. Hokum blues typically used the verse
form of couplet and refrain, had fast tempos, and dealt humorously with
sexual topics, often full of double entendre. Dorsey and Whitaker, sometimes
with Big Bill Broonzy substituting on guitar, often recorded as the Hokum
Boys or Famous Hokum Boys, but these names were also used by other
musicians. The style's popularity would last through the 1930s, and sexual
themes have remained part of the blues ever since. A number of the female
vaudeville singers and male-female duos also recorded hokum blues in the
late 1920s and early 1930s in an attempt to counter slumping record sales
that came with the onset of the economic Depression.
It was not until the end of 1928 that solo piano blues emerged as a
clearly defined format on records, although earlier players (Hersal Thomas,
Will Ezell, "Cow Cow" Davenport) had recorded. Success was achieved that
year with Chicago pianist Pine Top Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie,"
a dance-oriented instrumental piece with jive talking by Smith carrying
on an imaginary dialogue with dancers. An eight-to-the-bar riff was heard
prominently in the bass, modulating according to the twelve-bar harmonic
scheme, a pattern that took the name "boogie-woogie." Smith's blues was
the sound of the saloon or "barrelhouse" (another name given to this style)
and the urban house party. His success opened up the recording studios
to many other solo pianists (Romeo Nelson, Montana Taylor, Alex Moore,
Charlie Spand, Speckled Red) from this environment in both Chicago and
the South. Instrumental solos were common: many of these men had been
accompanists to singers, while the piano being a loud instrument and the
player in a small noisy saloon or house party having to face into it and
away from the audience, made any singing hard to hear. The success of this
style came as the Depression was setting in, so most of the records sold in
33 The development of the blues
small quantities, and few of the artists had more than one or two recording
sessions.
Consolidation
The Depression brought about the bankruptcy of almost all of the companies
that had been making "race records." Sales were reduced to a trickle, and in
1932 hardly any blues records were made. Another casualty was the vaude-
ville theatre circuit that had sustained so many, particularly female, artists.
Contributing to this decline was the growing popularity (since 1927) of talk-
ing pictures, which were cheaper to run than live music and more attractive
to audiences because of their novelty. A few vaudeville singers (Ida Cox,
Victoria Spivey, Trixie Smith) soldiered on, but recording sessions were
rare, and they had to combine the occasional theatre show with appear-
ances in cabarets, road houses, and tent shows. Most retired or faded into
obscurity, while a few like Ethel Waters and Hattie McDaniels enjoyed suc-
cess in the limited roles available to them in Hollywood films. Some made
comebacks in the 1940s as the jazz revival got under way. Most female blues
artists of the 1930s, such as Merline Johnson, Lil Johnson, Alice Moore, and
former vaudeville singer Lucille Bogan, sang in a rougher style like that of
their male counterparts and used similar accompaniments of a solo pianist
or a small combo of piano, guitar, and sometimes one or two other instru-
ments. Memphis Minnie and Georgia White even played their own guitar
and piano respectively. Male artists, however, would become the leading
forces in the blues from the 1930s on, while most women singers, such as
Lil Green and Rosetta Howard, tended to combine their blues with pop
material.
1933-1942 saw a consolidation of the blues recording industry and a
certain homogenization of sound in the music. Three record companies
emerged to dominate blues recording during this period. American Record
Company had Vocalion and several other labels, and eventually revived the
Okeh label. In 1938 they became part of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
RCA Victor's Bluebird label was the successor to the old Victor Records, and
Decca Records was a new company started in 1934. New York and especially
Chicago became the locations for most recording sessions, and two Chicago
talent scouts and producers, Lester Melrose and J. Mayo Williams, controlled
much of the access to recording for blues artists by the mid- 1930s, while
Art Satherly and a few others roamed the South to work with talent there.
Although the companies visited Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta, and Charlotte
with some regularity, field sessions for blues artists were considerably less
frequent. Chicago and New York were the places to be for those artists who
34 David Evans
wanted to get on records. Juke boxes and discount chain stores accounted
for an increasing share of record sales, and the companies began to take
an assembly line approach to blues recording. They sought artists who
were multiply talented as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, and
they often recorded them in massive sessions that yielded eight or more
master recordings in a few hours. Many of these artists sustained recording
careers of a decade or more and often appeared as sidemen on one another's
records or helped as songwriters and talent scouts. Despite the tendency
toward consolidation during this period, there was still a considerable variety
of styles to be heard, with some emerging lyric commentary on political
subjects.
Three artists of the 1930s with deep roots in the blues traditions of
Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee created styles on the piano, guitar, and
harmonica that seemed to consolidate their pasts and would point them in
their future direction as components in electric blues ensembles. Roosevelt
Sykes (from Helena, Arkansas) recorded almost every year from 1929 to
the 1970s, in formats from solo to eight-piece band. He displayed great
virtuosity and independence of the hands, especially on slow blues where
the left kept up an insistent beat deep in the bass while the right ranged freely
over the upper and middle keyboard playing horn-like passages with plenty
of flattened thirds and sevenths representing blue notes. Younger pianists
from the same Mid- South region, such as Memphis Slim and Otis Spann,
picked up this style and helped popularize it in ensembles during the 1940s
and 1950s. For most of the 1930s, Sykes was based in St. Louis, a city famed
for its piano players since the ragtime era. St. Louis was also home to Walter
Davis, who specialized in rather sad lyrics and played in a simplified and
idiosyncratic version of Sykes' style, and Peetie Wheatstraw who, in contrast,
presented the image of the wild reveler and played in a rhythmic style closer
to the older barrelhouse tradition. His vocal mannerism of leaping into the
falsetto range became widely imitated. A number of southern barrelhouse
pianists had a more improvisational right hand. Among the most successful
were Little Brother Montgomery, based in Jackson, Mississippi, and Walter
Roland from Birmingham. Texas pianists based in Houston, Dallas, San
Antonio, and Shreveport, Louisiana, were the most extensively recorded,
due largely to continuing field trips by the record companies to this region.
Their playing used a variety of bass patterns and was improvisational in the
right hand but generally with more harmonic development than that of
their counterparts in the Deep South and Chicago. Pianists like Black Boy
Shine, Rob Cooper, Andy Boy, Pinetop Burks, and Black Ivory King worked
a regional circuit of roadhouses and urban saloons in the Southwest, a region
which survived the Depression somewhat better than the rest of the country.
From c. 1935, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Jimmy
35 The development of the blues
Yancey led a revival of recording classic boogie-woogie piano. These were
virtuoso players who rarely sang, and by 1940 boogie-woogie began to be
appreciated as a form of instrumental jazz, being the first solo blues style
to achieve mass acceptance with a white audience. It reached its peak of
popularity during World War II, but continued thereafter to influence the
piano styles heard in jump blues bands and in the fields of country music
and rock'n'roll.
Robert Johnson from Robinsonville, Mississippi, was heir to the im-
passioned singing and harsh percussive Mississippi guitar style of Son
House, Willie Brown, and Charley Patton, and this is reflected especially in
Johnson's slide playing on the records he made in 1936 and 1937. But he also
listened to smoother players like Lonnie Johnson and especially to pianists
like Sykes, Wheatstraw and Carr. Johnson's recordings reflected all of these
influences (see Chapter 5) . He died in 1938, but his influence would be heard
over ten years later in the electric ensemble work of fellow Mississippi and
Arkansas guitarists who had migrated to Chicago, such as Muddy Waters,
Elmore James, Eddie Taylor, Johnny Shines, and Robert "Junior" Lockwood.
Blues rock guitarists from the 1 960s on were inspired by Johnson's songs and
style as well as his mysterious image, and a boxed collection of his complete
recordings became a platinum record in the 1990s. Other Mississippi blues
guitarists such as Bukka White and Big Joe Williams represented the rough
Deep South style on recordings during the 1930s and early 1940s, while
the melodically denser and more harmonic Piedmont style was success-
fully recorded by such artists as Joshua White from South Carolina, Buddy
Moss from Georgia, and Blind Boy Fuller from North Carolina. White and
Fuller's successor Brownie McGhee, along with harmonica player Sonny
Terry from North Carolina and guitar evangelist Reverend Gary Davis, re-
settled in New York City in the 1940s, influencing the nascent folk- music
revival scene there. Another set of blues guitarists in the 1930s, Kokomo
Arnold, Casey Bill Weldon, Oscar Woods, and Tampa Red, incorporated
the Hawaiian practice of playing long melodic lines with a slider, in contrast
to the older blues practice of using the slider to play short riffs.
Solo harmonica was recorded during the 1920s by such artists as De
Ford Bailey and Jaybird Coleman, but because the performer cannot play
and sing at the same time, it more often was heard in a blues setting with
other instruments. Alone, it was often confined to novelty pieces such as
train imitations. In the late 1920s and early 1930s the harmonica began to
be heard in duets with guitar and in jug bands. Learning from fellow West
Tennessee harmonica players Noah Lewis, who had played in Cannon's Jug
Stompers, and Hammie Nixon, who had accompanied guitarists Son Bonds
and Sleepy John Estes, Sonny Boy Williamson from Jackson, Tennessee,
consolidated the instrument's position in an ensemble setting. Between
36 David Evans
1937 and his death in 1948 Williamson recorded with groups ranging from
simply two guitars or guitar and piano to a five-piece band, adding bass
and drums. His playing was full of bent blue notes and had a vocal quality
that seemed to flow seamlessly in and out of his singing. He influenced
countless other players in the 1950s and later, most notably the great Little
Walter. His major rival during this period was Sonny Terry, who was an
equally spectacular player, notable for his interjection of vocal whoops in
his playing and his falsetto singing.
Many of the most popular blues artists during the 1930s and early 1940s
had come from the Deep South to Chicago. They helped establish this city
as a key destination for other artists and as a continuing center of blues
recording. Besides the female artists mentioned earlier, the most popular of
these stars were guitarists Big Bill (Broonzy), Bumble Bee Slim, Bill Gaither,
Tampa Red, and Johnnie Temple, pianists Jimmie Gordon, Blind John Davis,
Curtis Jones, Memphis Slim, and Big Maceo, harmonica players Jazz Gillum
and Robert Lee McCoy, and Washboard Sam. Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon, a
vaudeville veteran, and Doctor Clayton, whose singing anticipated the me-
lismatic quality of later soul blues stylists, were popular vocalists. To the
middle of the 1930s the typical instrumentation was guitar and piano in the
Carr / Blackwell style, or two guitars. Thence there was increasing supple-
mentation by such instruments as string bass, washboard, and harmonica.
Another kind of blues ensemble began to be heard from 1936 onward,
pioneered by a Chicago group calling itself the Harlem Hamfats. Led by
singer and guitarist Joe McCoy, they consisted of two guitars, piano, bass,
drums, trumpet, and clarinet, combining elements from Mississippi blues
and New Orleans style jazz. The jazz musicians represented the many players
at this time who were unwilling or unable to adapt to the more regimented
big band swing style and who found refuge with blues artists trying to obtain
a fuller and more sophisticated sound. The success of the Hamfats inspired
the creation of similar groups in Chicago and elsewhere, including Ollie
Shepard and His Kentucky Boys and Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five.
Big Bill, Tampa Red, Jimmie Gordon and others experimented with bands of
a similar instrumentation, while Johnnie Temple, Frankie Jaxon, and Rosetta
Howard borrowed the Harlem Hamfats for some of their recordings. Groups
of this sort proved to be another of the foundations for later blues bands.
Toward the end of the 1930s, the electric guitar entered the blues,
adopted by some of the leading Chicago stars, including Big Bill, Tampa
Red, Memphis Minnie, and Lonnie Johnson. In 1941 Arthur "Big Boy"
Crudup emerged, playing electric guitar but singing with a raw country
voice. He was accompanied at first only by a string bass, but by the mid-
1940s he had added drums. His sound was a precursor of the harsher electric
blues that would soon be recorded by other Mississippi migrants to Chicago
37 The development of the blues
like Muddy Waters. It also had a major influence on Elvis Presley and the
beginnings of rock'n'roll in the 1950s.
Blues in transition
The 1 940s were a transitional time for the blues, for the homogenizing trends
were reversed and new styles emerged. The military draft for World War II
broke up many blues groups and removed musicians from their commu-
nities. During the war a shellac shortage and a strike against the recording
studios called by the American Federation of Musicians crippled the record
industry. New independent record companies founded by entrepreneurs
from varied backgrounds sprang up in cities all across America, especially
after the war and the strike ended, and they drew upon local talent in many
cases. Many recorded black music, including blues. The post-war years were
a time of prosperity, even for blacks to some degree. Many had left the rural
South during the war for military service and jobs in the North, the West
Coast, and southern cities, fleeing poverty and racism, while the increasing
mechanization of agriculture and the decline of the sharecropping system
drove many others to the cities. By the end of the decade the first of many
radio stations with an all-black on-air format was established in Memphis,
broadcasting a steady diet of live and recorded blues.
Most of the established Chicago blues stars of the pre-war years contin-
ued to record in the 1940s for the three major companies and sold records
in good quantities thanks to superior distribution. But by the end of the
decade their sound was passe, and these companies soon got out of the
blues field, leaving it entirely to the independent labels and a largely new
cast of characters. The electric guitar had meanwhile become increasingly
prominent: by the early 1950s it had given new life to solo country blues,
making the sound of Lightnin' Hopkins and Li'l Son Jackson from Texas and
John Lee Hooker from Detroit by way of Mississippi, louder and more in-
sistent. Hopkins performed in a somewhat spare version of the style created
by Blind Lemon Jefferson, while Hooker featured pentatonic tunes without
many harmonic changes and boogie rhythms drawn from piano and en-
semble blues. Although most of the solo guitar performers were based in
cities, their country origins were quite apparent in their voices, lyrics, and
sound.
At the opposite end of the spectrum were the blues shouters and croon-
ers, who projected an air of comfortable urbanity. Some of them did not
play an instrument but, like their pop music counterparts, left that chore
to others. Their music suggests the post-World War II mood of confidence,
progress, sophistication, and growing assertiveness in black urban America.
38 David Evans
They remained popular into the 1950s. The shouters sang with big, husky,
authoritative voices, offering lyrics on upbeat themes of partying, drink-
ing, love-making and other good-time activities, or messages directed at
the opposite sex that made it clear that the singer meant business. The
preferred style of accompaniment for shouters was the five- to seven-piece
jump band, evolved from older groups like the Harlem Hamfats and Louis
Jordan's Tympany Five as well as scaled-down big bands. Most of the musi-
cians were versatile jazzmen. A honking, bleating, shrieking saxophone with
some bebop flavoring became the most prominent lead instrument, while
drums and a boogie-woogie-styled piano were also prominent. A number of
the singers, in fact, played saxophone or drums in their bands. Few were gui-
tarists. Some of the shouters were pianists, although these musicians more
often tended to be crooners preferring a smaller, softer, "after hours" format
such as piano and lightly amplified jazzy guitar with string bass and/or light
drums, following Nat "King" Cole and other jazz and pop singers. Shouting
and crooning were two sides of the same coin, both urbane and sophisticated,
and some singers were adept at both styles. Although early strongholds of
these styles appear to have been Kansas City and other midwestern cities
stretching down to Oklahoma and Texas, their greatest flowering was in
California, where many migrants from this area had settled during and after
World War II and where there were many new independent record compa-
nies. Some of the pioneer shouters had experience in the big swing bands that
were popular in the 1930s and early 1940s. Louis Jordan himself had worked
in Chick Webb's band. Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams sang with Count
Basie's Orchestra in Kansas City, and Jimmy Witherspoon and Walter Brown
sang with Jay McShann's band there. Big Joe Turner was another Kansas City
shouter, who worked with big bands and boogie-woogie pianists and man-
aged to carry his style into rock'n'roll in the 1950s. Wynonie Harris from
nearby Omaha, a highly popular shouter, had sung with Lucky Millinder's
Orchestra. A big voice and commanding presence were undoubted advan-
tages when singing with these large aggregations. Singers from Texas and
Oklahoma especially wound up on the West Coast. More of them played in-
struments than their counterparts from further north, including drummer
Roy Milton, guitarist Jimmy Liggins, and alto sax player Eddie Vinson, along
with a host of crooning/shouting pianists: Charles Brown, Floyd Dixon, Joe
Liggins, Little Willie Littlefield, Ivory Joe Hunter, Amos Milburn, and Percy
Mayfield. But there were shouters and crooners in many other cities of
the Midwest and South: New Orleans (Roy Brown, Cousin Joe), Charlotte
(Nappy Brown) , Atlanta (Billy Wright) and Ohio (Bull Moose Jackson, Tiny
Bradshaw, and H-Bomb Ferguson). Rufus Thomas and Gatemouth Moore
were from Memphis, while even Clarksdale, Mississippi, had a jump band,
Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm. Crooning pianists Cecil Cant and Johnny
39 The development of the blues
Ace were from Nashville and Memphis. Veteran Lonnie Johnson enjoyed
another of his periodic comebacks as a blues crooner. Some shouters worked
within vocal groups (the Midnighters, the Five Royales, and the Coasters)
using jump band instrumentation and specializing in blues on humorous
and sexual topics, making the transition to rock'n'roll in the 1950s. There
were also female shouters with backgrounds in gospel singing, and crooners
influenced by jazz and pop singers, especially Billie Holiday. These singers
included Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, Little Esther, Big Maybelle, Etta
James, Big Mama Thornton, and singing pianists Camille Howard, Hadda
Brooks, Nellie Lutcher, and Julia Lee.
In the late 1940s and 1950s in Chicago, a small electric combo format
developed, combining some characteristics of both the solo electric gui-
tarists (the raw quality and closeness to country roots) and the jump bands
(volume, power, and urban aggressiveness) . Black people were streaming out
of the plantations of the Deep South, often heading straight for Chicago,
Gary, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Cleveland. Because of its prior
importance in blues and the presence of many new independent record
companies, Chicago became the focal point for this new style. The bands
featured typically one or two electric guitars, usually a harmonica played
through an amplifier, drums, and perhaps string bass, piano, or even a saxo-
phone. Some of the earliest groups were just harmonica and two guitars. The
singing guitarists had often started out as solo performers on acoustic in-
struments in the South and built or joined a band after they came to Chicago.
There was little obvious jazz influence: the musicians had grown up in the
country, and they were loud and raw. Repeated riffs, bottleneck guitar, and
wailing harmonica abounded. Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, two leaders
in this movement, were both from Mississippi and had been influenced by
older country blues artists such as Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert
Johnson. Other prominent figures were guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Elmore
James, Eddie Taylor, J. B. Lenoir, and Bo Diddley, all from Mississippi, har-
monica players Little Walter, Junior Wells, and Jimmy Reed, and pianists
Sunnyland Slim, Willie Mabon, and Otis Spann.
Chicago was not the only place where this sound existed: artists like
Baby Boy Warren and Bobo Jenkins had a similar sound in Detroit, and
it could be heard in the Delta itself in Willie Love, Sonny Boy Williamson
No. 2, and Woodrow Adams (Howlin Wolf and Elmore James had recorded
in this format in the South before they headed to Chicago). From the late
1950s a regional variant of this style emerged in the Baton Rouge area, with
artists like Slim Harpo, Lazy Lester, Lightnin' Slim, and Lonesome Sundown
combining influences from the Delta, Chicago, New Orleans, and Texas.
Another late developing regional variant was found in the hills of northern
Mississippi, built around a riffing electric country blues guitar and rhythms
40 David Evans
influenced by local fife and drum bands. Some of its chief exponents were
Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside, and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Although this
style existed by the 1960s, it wasn't recorded to any extent until the 1980s,
too late to make a national impact among black listeners whose tastes in
blues had moved on.
Two other interesting small combo variants emanated from Louisiana.
From the Creole population came zydeco blues, featuring the electric accor-
dion as the lead instrument with vocals occasionally sung in French, exem-
plified by Clifton Chenier. This style developed among Creole migrants in
urban southeast Texas, especially Houston, in the early 1950s, but it soon
spread back to southwest Louisiana where it has remained entrenched. New
Orleans, with its rich jazz tradition strongly grounded in the blues, devel-
oped a sound built around piano, a horn section and drums. It is closer
to the blues shouter and jump band style but with the unique rhythmic
sensibility and vocal phrasing of New Orleans: a number of the blues use
an eight-bar rather than twelve-bar form. Pianists Professor Longhair and
Fats Domino, guitarist Smiley Lewis, and vocalist Earl King were prominent
here.
Modern styles and the move to rock'n'roll
Rock'n'roll during its earliest years grew largely out of elements from electric
country blues, Kansas City blues shouters, and Chicago and New Orleans
small combo blues. The unifying factors were a fast danceable beat and
lyrics that appealed to adolescent sensibilities. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley
introduced sounds from Chicago blues, while Fats Domino, Little Richard,
and Larry Williams introduced New Orleans elements. Most rock'n'roll
artists from the Memphis area were whites who had absorbed the blues,
both from direct contact and through radio and records. Elvis Presley, Carl
Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others enjoyed initial popularity with black
listeners, and these "hillbilly cats" appeared for a time to be turning blues into
an integrated music, while other black artists from Memphis and Mississippi,
such as Rufus Thomas and Ike Turner, were also involved. By 1 960, rock'n'roll
and blues had diverged, with the former becoming a predominantly white
field. Black secular music became categorized as either blues, r&b, or a newly
emerging "soul music."
The most enduring blues sound post-1945, and one that strongly influ-
enced rock'n'roll, was the electric lead guitar, featuring horn-like melodic
lines and extreme use of string bending. This is a sound that requires a band
of some size to provide a harmonic and rhythmic background. Modern
electric guitar emerged in the mixed jazz-blues musical environment of the
41 The development of the blues
Southwest and Midwest. Oklahoma City jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and
Dallas blues guitarist Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, who had known one another
in the early 1930s, are generally regarded as pioneers of this style, although
its blues roots can be traced back to the work of Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Although Jefferson performed solo on an acoustic instrument, his extended
improvisational lines and string-bending anticipated ideas these younger
musicians would develop when the instrument became amplified. It was
Walker and other Texas guitarists, mostly relocated on the West Coast,
who would spread this style in the blues world of the 1940s. Among the
other prominent early performers were Saunders King, Pee Wee Crayton,
Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, and Lowell Fulson. The latter, originally
from Oklahoma, evolved from a country blues to a lead guitarist over the
course of his early recording career in the 1940s. Later Texas guitarists such
as Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, and Johnny "Guitar" Watson carried
this style forward. While Walker preferred a "jazzy" sound on an ampli-
fied hollow-bodied instrument, the younger guitarists generally strove for
a more "electric" sound, often on a solid-bodied guitar.
Certainly by the early 1950s, blues guitarists outside the Texas-West
Coast axis, such as Memphis-based B. B. King, were being affected by this
new sound. Like Walker, King preferred to work with large bands containing
a full horn section. He brought a harder edge to his playing, however, and
displayed less jazz influence. King's records during the 1 950s were immensely
popular with black audiences, and he did much to spread the popularity
of this guitar sound. By the mid-1950s it could be heard in Chicago small-
group blues in recordings by Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and others.
Older Chicago artists like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters began employing
younger players to add this sound to their bands, and by the end of the decade
hundreds of blues guitarists had mastered this style.
Formerly a gospel singer, B. B. King was also a pioneer blues vocalist,
introducing a gospel-influenced "soul" style in the early 1950s, demonstrat-
ing a highly emotional, often pleading quality, with extreme use of melisma
and occasional leaps into the falsetto range. Otis Rush and Buddy Guy sang
in this style, as did Bobby Bland, who was not an instrumentalist, while
Ray Charles and James Brown took soul singing into the field of rock'n'roll
and beyond. Soul blues has remained the most popular style with black
audiences to the present, often in association with the sound of electric lead
guitar and a horn section, as in the work of Little Milton, Albert King, and
Z. Z. Hill.
From the late 1950s, following the incorporation of electric bass and
keyboards into blues ensembles and the ascendancy of electric lead guitar
and soul blues singing, blues experienced a slowdown in its evolutionary
development within the American black community. Popular blues in 2000
42 David Evans
sounded little different from popular blues in 1960. Innovative artists such
as limi Hendrix had their main influence in rock or jazz, while stylistic
outgrowths of blues, such as soul music and funk, were generally viewed as
new and distinct genres. Blues became increasingly a music of nostalgia and
a symbol of cultural heritage or "roots" for black audiences. Songs with self-
conscious titles, like "Why I Sing the Blues," "I'll Play the Blues for You,"
"Down Home Blues," and "The Blues Is All Right" became popular hits.
The 1990s witnessed the emergence of a number of sons and daughters of
prominent blues artists of an earlier era as well as other younger black artists
who explored older historical styles such as solo country blues. Most of these
new artists have performed mainly for white American and international
audiences.
This halt in stylistic evolution coincided with major political victories
of the Civil Rights movement, which removed or ameliorated many of the
social factors that had contributed to the rise of blues as a form of ex-
pression. The Civil Rights movement stressed collective action and used
adaptations of spirituals, sung by groups, to express its goals. It had little
use for the individualistic and socially marginal stance of the blues singer.
This halt also coincided with the growth of white interest and involvement
in the blues. This was not an entirely new phenomenon. White folklorists,
collectors, record company executives, songwriters, and even a few musi-
cians had been involved in the documentation and production of African
American blues almost from the beginning. Southern white audiences, espe-
cially, had patronized artists such as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson,
and Bessie Smith, as did some of the more astute early white jazz fans.
Whites even began to perform blues within the genres of country music
and later rock'n'roll, sometimes creating distinct styles such as the "blue
yodel" and "rockabilly," but whites working in these styles never viewed
themselves primarily as "blues singers." It was the folk-music revival that
began to change the role of whites in the blues. During the 1940s and 1950s
Leadbelly, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry
began to gain a white following at coffee houses, college concerts, and left-
wing political events. By the early 1960s a number of veteran country blues
artists, who had made great recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, were redis-
covered and brought before these same audiences. Soon a few white solo
performers, such as John Hammond, Jr., began to emerge as blues special-
ists. By the early and mid-1960s one could also witness the phenomenon of
the white electric blues band both in the United States and Great Britain.
From that time onward blues has grown in popularity among American
whites and internationally, until by the end of the century there were un-
doubtedly far more non-black performers than blacks viewing themselves
43 The development of the blues
as blues specialists. Most of these performers have continued to work within
established contemporary blues parameters or have explored and re-created
historical sounds, creating new songs, sometimes developing new themes
to reflect a more modern lifestyle, and maintaining a high level of instru-
mental virtuosity. Although its stylistic development has slowed, blues has
increased and broadened its audience, until today it is more popular than
ever.
4 The development of gospel music
DON CUSIC
Psalms and hymns
Although a distinctive American voice would not truly emerge until the
nineteenth century, the musical roots of modern America were planted in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The settlers in the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were not the first to
come to the New World; in fact, the first Europeans to establish themselves
in America were the Spanish explorers who came through Mexico and the
southwestern area of what is now the United States. The first gospel songs
sung in the New World have been traced to the Roman Catholic Church
through the inhabitants of what is now the southern U.S.A. and Mexico.
Catholic service books were published in Mexico as early as 1556 and the
main effect of this Catholic influence was to introduce the Gregorian chant,
sung in Latin, to America.
However, the true settling and growth of what became identified as the
United States came from the European settlers who peopled the eastern
seaboard and then began moving westward; the roots of U.S. American
music are embedded in the European culture these settlers left behind.
The Reformation in Europe brought a new song, sung in the vernacular
(not in Latin) by the entire congregation. Two basic forms emerged here:
the chorale (associated with the Lutherans and Moravians), and the psalm
tune, which developed among the Calvinists. Both the French and English
sang psalms which were paraphrased in regular meter, to which were added
paraphrases of other lyric passages from scriptures. They sang "God's word"
from the Bible. The Lutherans also sang "God's word," but welcomed devo-
tional poems written by individuals. The Puritans of New England came
from the Calvinist tradition and the transition in America from scriptural to
devotional poems - psalms to hymns - was a long and gradual one, hindered
by the Puritans' strict adherence to the psalms. Musically, there was a major
difference as the Lutherans and Moravians made use of the organ and orch-
estral instruments in worship while the Calvinists and English dissenters
sang metrical poems in unison without musical accompaniment.
The first book published in America was The Whole Book of Psalmes
Faithfully Translated Into English Metre, commonly known as The Bay
Psalm Book. It appeared in 1640 in the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts
45 The development of gospel music
and contained the first version of psalms made by Americans and used in
American churches. The success of the Bay Psalm Book was immediate, with
1,700 copies in the first printing and 2,000 copies of a new edition in 1651.
In all, there were twenty-seven editions of this book printed in New England
and at least twenty in England (the last in 1754), and six in Scotland.
The ninth edition, published in 1698, was the first to contain music to
accompany the texts. Prior to that, only the words were printed; they were
sung to a known melody with a handful of melodies fitting a large number of
songs.
In the eighteenth century, some changes evolved, basically reflecting
the changes occurring in England. The Methodists and their Methodism
brought the Wesley hymns to New Jersey and the later comers to New
England imported the hymns of Isaac Watts. Ironically, the initial resistance
Watts encountered with his hymns in America was the same he had en-
countered in England; his "hymns of human composure" were not literal
renderings of the psalms but rather came from the human heart. During
this time, the psalm was still the predominant form of gospel music, sung
in churches as well as homes.
During the 1600s and early 1700s, the New England congregations were
noted for singing their psalm tunes at a very slow tempo, known as the
"old way." As with most religious customs, its adherents defended it as the
"only proper mode" for performing music in church. This was challenged in
the early part of the eighteenth century by advocates of the "new way," who
encouraged singing by note instead of rote, briskly in harmony rather than
slowly and in unison. The state of singing had sunk to a low from years of
having no formal music training for singers, and from having psalm books
with texts but no melodies to read.
This problem was met by the rise of the singing school, giving instruc-
tion and training in the rudiments of music to members of a church or
community, and also by the rise of the singing master in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. These singing masters came into a community,
gathered up a class through word of mouth and door-to-door canvassing,
and taught for about a week. At the end of that week, students were able to
read music and had learned some new songs.
While psalm singing dominated the seventeenth century and continued
through the introduction of hymns in the eighteenth century, the nine-
teenth century was marked by the emergence of the denominational hymn.
Although tenors had generally sung the melody in earlier times, sopranos
sang the melody in the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century,
one person "set the pitch," then the entire congregation sang the psalm.
However, the eighteenth century brought the emergence of the musical
elite - the choir - which changed the seating pattern (and architecture)
46 Don Cusic
within the church. During this time, a gallery was often erected over the
entrance vestibule and sometimes on three sides of the church, with the
choir sitting apart from the congregation.
The development of tune books (books which contained melodies) was
due primarily to enterprising individuals who developed these books for
singing school classes, church choirs and, eventually, for the organist. There
was an obvious convenience in having the music associated with the words,
although they were generally on opposite pages. After the mid-nineteenth
century, the congregation hymnal with words and music appeared. The
words were generally under the tune on the same page and sometimes
several texts were given for one tune.
The eighteenth century saw a secularization of sacred music occur that
would not only help make that music more appealing to a wide public,
but also carry it outside the church where it would stand alone outside
the worship. The churches of New England adopted Calvinist practice by
prohibiting musical instruments or choirs in their public worship, thus
separating themselves from the professional music traditions of the Roman
Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Anglicans. In the latter churches, the
emphasis on the music had shifted from the congregation to a designated
group of singers singing to a non-participating audience, like in a theatre.
The introduction of choirs led to more elaborate songs.
Spirituals
The revivals that followed the Revolutionary War, known as "The Great
Awakening," were not highly organized affairs and cannot be traced in a
logical, sequential manner; rather, there were a number of religious freedom
fires. As the country pushed westward, these revivals sprang up in various
areas of the country for several generations, offending organized religion
because revival preachers paid no heed to denominational lines, preaching
wherever they could gather a crowd.
The Revolutionary War had capped the great concept of "freedom" that
had been raging in the colonies. In the urban areas, the rationalism which
fueled the French Revolution and provided new breakthroughs in science
and philosophy caught hold. However, in the untamed parts of the country,
this rationalism had little appeal; the settlers had neither the time nor the
inclination to ponder intellectual enlightenment. These people needed a
faith that was vibrant and alive, full of emotion and comfort, that let them
relate to the lonely, danger-filled wilderness and a life steeped heavily in
individualism. Thus, it was a "free" religion that took hold.
Socially, the new free religion was perfect for the common man who
was poor. Sinful things were from the rich and were to be condemned;
47 The development of gospel music
hence the rich pursuits of gambling, drinking and such were quickly labeled
as sin and railed against. The large urban areas became dens of iniquity
while rural America provided the most fertile soil for folk religion. Here,
it grew and spread, watered with an emotional spirituality that provided a
comfort to the lonely settlers while fanning the flames of hell. While this
folk religion came under no organizational guidelines, one basic tenet ran
through it - all institutional mediacy between an individual's soul and the
Redeemer must be rejected - all, no matter what their station in life, had
access to God.
As the settlers moved westward, they moved beyond the influence of
established churches and were served by a new kind of preacher, born on
the frontier, or at least familiar with frontier life. Although such preachers
generally had little formal education, they did have the ability to move au-
diences and would preach wherever people could be assembled. The "camp
meeting" was born from the lack of a central church in the vast rural regions
and because the settlers lived so far apart. These camp meetings brought
people together for several days from large surrounding areas with families
bringing food and living in their wagons, the women sleeping inside and
the men on the ground underneath or in improvised shelters.
The Baptists were a particularly free group with dissensions breaking
out within their sect about predestination, grace and a number of other
theological issues. Within neither Britain nor America did they accept a
central church authority; in music this meant they were devoted to "free"
singing rather than singing songs prescribed to them by others. The spirit
of the folk Baptists dominated this time of revivals after the Revolutionary
War and the songs they chose to sing differed greatly from the psalms of the
Puritans with their long texts. The revival spirituals, born from these mass
meetings, emphasized choruses, refrains, and repeated lines.
In the period from 1780 to 1830, a great body of folk texts appeared in
the gospel tradition. Great Britain and the young United States were full of
folk tunes at the time and religious folk often put religious verses to popular
secular tunes. The wedding of religious lyrics and folk tunes probably began
around 1770 and continued strongly through this period. The composed
tunes of the pre-Revolutionary War period in America remained unknown
to the rural Americans who had moved westward, so they used tunes from
the folk tradition for their worship. The source for these American folk tunes
was primarily British - from England, Scotland, and Ireland mainly - with
only a handful from other sources.
The Kentucky Revival of 1 800 established the revival spiritual in America.
The Kentucky Revival was not the first and was similar to a number of other
revivals that preceded it; however, the flames here seemed to burn higher
and brighter because of a number of favorable conditions. One was the
ethnic background of the population: primarily Gaels (Irish, Scots-Irish,
48 Don Cusic
Scottish, Welsh) who were known as highly emotional people. Another
factor was climatic-geographic. The Kentucky farmers had a period of
leisure during the summer from the time their crops were planted until
harvesting time (as opposed to their New England counterparts who had a
short summer) and the dry roads and trails invited long trips to big gath-
erings. Also, the dry, hot summers lent themselves to meeting outdoors,
thereby accommodating large numbers of people. The final factor was the
lack of organized, established religion in that area, which meant no religious
or civil authorities had to be battled for these revivals to occur.
The crowds at these gatherings had to sing from memory or learn songs
that were easily repetitive and took little effort to learn, because there were
no song books. Here, the revival songs were in the hands of the people
as the real exhortational activity - praying, mourning and other physical
exercises - was by and for the crowd. The singers controlled the songs but the
crowds would join in the chorus, on a short-phrase refrain or on a couplet
which struck their fancy. This led to the development of revival songs with
repetitive passages.
The verse-with-chorus idea spread quickly with some choruses proving
so popular they were interjected into other songs with different verses. There
developed two types of revival songs at this time: the repetitive chorus and
the call and response where a line was sung by the singer and the crowd sang
the responding line, which always remained the same.
This was the time when the folk tradition of song - an oral tradition
that had begun in Britain and other parts of Europe - took over in religious
music. The settlers moving west had little if any music training and neither
song books nor established churches. When the revivals caught hold, music
was returned to the people who responded with a congregational type of
singing reminiscent of the earliest Puritans, albeit much more emotional
and active. They had to depend upon tunes they already knew, much as the
first Puritans did with their songs. But the nature of the revivals caused a
major change. The melodies had to be altered to accommodate choruses
that everyone could learn quickly. Thus the song leader would know the
verses but everyone could know the chorus and would join the song on
these choruses or on lines that repeated themselves. This was democracy in
action; everyone could feel a part of this religion and singing. Moreover, the
choruses spoke the feelings of the settlers.
As the first half of the nineteenth century ended, the old-time religion
faded as the cultural environment gave way to the Industrial Revolution and
the Civil War. After the Civil War, the second half of the nineteenth century
witnessed a new religious trend appear as the wild, emotion-packed camp
meeting style of religion gave way to a more solemn, sober movement,
centered in the urban areas with the music of the gospel hymns.
49 The development of gospel music
The folk hymns and spirituals were the last gospel songs to be perpetuated
solely in the oral tradition, although they survive now because they were
collected in print and because folklorists collected them on tape. Although
some were written anew by individuals, many of the hymns come from the
broadside ballad tradition and the folksongs brought to the U.S.A. from
Europe. The Negro Spirituals are often black adaptations of white songs,
influenced heavily by the African origins of black Americans but reflecting
the culture of a people united and suppressed in America.
The songs of this period reflect the oral tradition as well as the re-
vival spirit of singing "spontaneously," without books, led by a singer with
the congregation joining on key lines, phrases, or the chorus. These are
songs easily learned and easily remembered. They are also easily changed
and adapted from singer to singer, congregation to congregation, with
the chorus or key lines remaining and the verse lyrics subject to individ-
ual changes. They are timeless songs because of the repetitiveness but also
because of their emotional appeal. They are songs that can inspire joy or
comfort in sorrow, a verbalizing of people's feelings and thoughts. Within
these songs are the roots of blues, country, modern gospel and rock'n'roll.
Musically and lyrically simple, their power rests in their emotional im-
pact and their ability to be learned and sung easily: some examples include
"Remember, Sinful Youth," "The Hebrew Children," "Didn't My Lord
Deliver Daniel" and "Were You There? (When They Crucified My Lord)."
Differential practices in South and North
The history of gospel music in the South differs from that of the North,
primarily because of the agricultural economy of the South, and the use of
slavery to work the large plantations.
The first slaves were brought to Virginia by Dutch traders in 1629. Soon,
a whole economy and way of life was based on slavery, particularly in the
South where large plantations grew acres of cotton and needed slave labor to
keep them going. Slavery grew quickly in North America and soon there was
a bustling slave trade spawned by Europeans between Africa and America.
From 1720 to the 1760s over 150,000 new African slaves arrived in America.
Many Christian whites perpetuated the myth that blacks were descendants
of the biblical Ham, wicked son of Noah, and that their bondage was a mark
of sin from God.
There was, however, some early concern among white colonial
Christians about the salvation of blacks. Cotton Mather, the venerable New
England preacher, argued that blacks had souls; however, many whites
refused to baptize blacks because this act inferred certain liberties on
50 Don Cusic
black individuals that whites were reluctant to bestow. Mather solved the
problem somewhat by offering the alternative of huge indentures imposed
by masters on Negroes which would ensure slavery after baptism. The belief
that African blacks were slaves because God had ordained it was a concept
many American whites openly embraced and promulgated. There was an
obligation connected to this - the "White Man's Burden" - that required
whites to convert African Americans to Christianity in order to save their
souls.
The conversion of blacks was guided by the same principles as those of
whites: each individual was expected to confront God and make his decision
for Jesus, be "born-again" or "get religion." Many white settlers carried their
black slaves with them during the early camp meetings at the beginning of
the 1800s and the blacks heard psalms and camp meetings songs. Traveling
preachers preached to both white and black audiences on southern farms
because small congregations were often not segregated. The slaves made
a number of conscious attempts to reproduce the songs they heard but
often sang these songs in a different manner, affecting rhythms which were
different from the original and, because of an insufficient vocabulary or
inability to recall the words correctly, different lyrics or lyrics which have
been reproduced as Negro dialect, markedly different from white speech.
Musically, then, the spirituals, because born from slavery, became separate
from the southern folksongs primarily because of the differences in the
black and white cultures and the particular aptitude of African Americans
for rhythms.
While the early white settlers placed a heavy emphasis on the words
with the music being incidental - a handful of tunes were used, often in-
terchangeable with different sets of lyrics - the black American felt a need
to emphasize music over the words. But it was more than just a different
melody; it was a whole new rhythm, an entirely new "feel" to the songs which
became defined as black gospel. So, even though the blacks and whites often
sang the same words, learned from the same sources, the results were two
entirely different songs, with the black gospel songs rhythmical in a way the
white songs never were.
The spirituals were created by a people bound in slavery and were an
integral part of the culture in the early nineteenth century. However, it
was not until after the Civil War that the spiritual was first recorded in
print. The first major book containing words and music of spirituals was
Slave Songs of the United States in 1867, but the first real awareness of the
spirituals came with the Fisk Jubilee Singers' Jubilee Songs and their tour
of northern cities in order to raise money to help their financially strapped
institution in the post-Civil War years when the black education movement
51 The development of gospel music
was struggling to survive and thrive. Still, the blacks' gospel music was
virtually ignored by white Christians and it was not until the twentieth
century that denominational hymnals included spirituals.
Musicologist and folk-music collector George Pullen Jackson noted in
the early part of the twentieth century that many of the black spirituals had
white origins and could be traced back to the British folksong tradition and
early American camp meetings. Many later called his conclusions racist for
denying African origins for these songs. Jackson was correct in tracing these
songs to their source; however, he ignored the musical rhythms that defined
black gospel, tracing only words and melodies. In addition, he overlooked
the development of the "holiness" movement in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century which was a source of an essential difference between black
and white gospel music.
"Holiness" songs
The roots of the holiness church go back to the 1890s and the "Latter
Rain Movement" which sought to "irrigate the dry bones" in churches.
Pentecostal congregations, characterized by this intense emotionalism in
the worship service, developed all over the country, especially among the
poor and depressed. The term "holy rollers" comes from this movement
because people are liable to scream, shout, dance, jump or roll on the floor
for Jesus. These churches place a heavy emphasis on being "saved, sanctified,
and filled with the Holy Spirit" which means a possession by the Spirit so
the person is not chained to this world but free to act or say whatever God
wants done or said, using the individual's voice and body.
The black holiness churches feature a great amount of singing and
dancing in their services, with half of the service usually comprised of music.
These churches were the first to use musical instruments in the service,
instruments that churches had long considered "of the devil." Conservatism
has long been a staple of American Christianity and the mainstream
African American churches, while usually more emotional than white
churches, generally rejected the intense emotional involvement and extreme
physical activities the holiness churches introduced as a regular part of their
services.
There are foot-stomping and hand-clapping up-tempo songs in holiness
churches, songs replete with complex rhythms, but the archetypal holiness
song is a slow chant, often begun as church starts or later, during a prolonged
series of shouts and outbursts. The ministers, with their strong personal
charisma and elaborate showmanship, are the key factor in the holiness
52 Don Cusic
churches and they are required to lead the church to a spiritual high during
the service that will enable the congregation to face six hard, troublesome
weekdays. The faith is composed of mystery, divinely inspired intuition
and visions that cannot be explained in this world. Holiness church is the
antithesis of rationalism.
Both the spiritual jubilee tradition and the jubilee singers tradition come
from the songs developed amongst the African American population at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. While these songs were established
before the Civil War, the Moody-Sankey hymns came along after the Civil
War, which serves as a convenient dividing place for these two kinds of black
gospel songs. The Fisk Jubilee Singers sang a variety of songs (including
"Amazing Grace") in a very "formal" and (classical) "European" presenta-
tion, while the "spiritual jubilee tradition" generally refers to songs such
as "Go Down, Moses" and "Roll, Jordan, Roll" that were sung before the
Civil War within a much more informal presentational format. However,
the black gospel music tradition that has evolved really began to take form
at the beginning of the twentieth century, when African Americans began
to publish their own music.
Early gospel: Dorsey
The key figure in black gospel songwriting and publishing is Thomas Dorsey,
who became known as a great personality, composer, publisher, performer,
teacher, choir director and organizer as well as minister of music for the
Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. More than any other individual, Dorsey
defined contemporary black gospel music, even though he was not the
first African American to have his songs published. That honor belongs to
C. Albert Tindley, who wrote during the early 1 900s and was a great influence
on the young Dorsey, particularly with his great classics "I'll Overcome"
(later altered to become "We Shall Overcome") and "Stand By Me." But it was
Dorsey and his songs that unified the movement which became black gospel,
giving a definition to the music that has survived through the twentieth
century.
Dorsey, of course, was a gigantic figure in gospel music outside his
publishing. He trained and accompanied countless singers and fought for
recognition against ministries and church musicians who were opposed to
their using his songs in churches. Finally, the National Baptist Convention
(Negro), which convened in Chicago in 1930, allowed the performance of
two Dorsey songs and the reaction from delegates charted the direction for
black gospel.
53 The development of gospel music
Dorsey had first made a name for himself in secular music, under the
name "Georgia Tom," writing "The Stormy Sea Blues" for Ma Rainey and
"Tight Like That" for Tampa Red. But with gospel, he found his calling
and his true genius took root and flourished. As director of the gospel
choir at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, Dorsey helped a number of
singers and had a forum for writing and experimenting with new songs he
composed. This material ushered in a new era for black gospel and other
new songs emerged as the great singers - most of whom came out of choirs
(often Dorsey's) as soloists - developed. As black gospel was recorded and
released, these singers could establish national reputations and influence
others who would never have seen or heard them otherwise. This served
to unify black gospel and increasingly bring it to the attention of white
churches and singers, who were influenced by the style and rhythms, and
often copied some of the songs and bought some of the records.
The 1930s were Dorsey's most prolific time as the Depression created
a need for his optimistic, uplifting songs. He used the blues form in his
melodies and his decidedly gospel lyrics were aimed at the poor and outcast.
Part of genius is subconscious and Dorsey's use of blues and jazz musical
forms seems often not to have been deliberate.
As the music became more accepted in the churches, Dorsey's stature
as a songwriter grew until he was, in the words of Mahalia Jackson, "our
Irving Berlin." The churches at this time - the early twentieth century - had
suffered from a musical lapse and did not supply the emotional support
or physical outlet to allow the sermons to be effective. Dorsey, along with
singers like Sallie Martin, ushered in the golden era for gospel, c. 1945-1960.
The era was carried by Dorsey's Gospel Singers' convention, established by
him and Sallie Martin in 1932 at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago.
This convention attracted a number of fine singers and became an institution
dedicated to advancing gospel as both an art form and a way of life.
Although Dorsey's songs were written first for the black congregations,
they also struck a responsive chord with whites. Two top publishers for white
churches, Stamps-Baxter and R. E. Winsett, began anthologizing Dorsey
tunes in the late 1930s and his two biggest songs, "Peace in the Valley"
and "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," were major hits in the white market,
becoming million sellers for Red Foley and Elvis Presley, respectively.
Unlike many other forms of gospel music, black gospel has a distinctive,
identifiable sound making much use of jazz- derived rhythms and blues
singing. This "feeling" in music, which is uniquely black, comes from a
deep-felt emotionalism anchored in the African American experience and
a certain hopelessness in their earthly life that is balanced with a shin-
ing hopefulness in their life to come. The inspiration of trouble, sorrow,
54 Don Cusic
thanksgiving and joy in addition to the highly individualistic style of the
singers distinguishes black gospel from white. The same song is rarely
ever sung the same way twice, with an emphasis on improvisation within
the song causing each performance to be a wholly different experience for
both singer and audience. This inventiveness on the part of black singers
renders it nearly impossible to transcribe this music in sheet form. Although
it is put on sheet music, it is rarely sung by African Americans exactly as it
is written because the song essentially remains in the oral tradition, learned
by rote with the sheet music serving as a source of lyrics for the singers and
a guide for basic chords by piano players. While a white chorus will buy a
number of copies of sheet music to learn a song - each member using a
copy to sing from - the black choir will generally learn the song by ear and
the only members with sheet music will be the director and piano player.
For that reason, the sheet music for African Americans will usually only
include the lead melody line and piano accompaniment while sheet music
for whites will have all the parts - soprano, alto, tenor, bass - written out.
The holiness church has also encouraged and inspired blacks to express
their own culture, rather than simply to be black versions of white churches.
This has meant that black churches' evolution to a mainstream denomina-
tion has greatly differed from that of their white counterparts. With churches
so segregated, this has served to divide Christianity and gospel music into
two distinctive camps, black and white. While each may borrow songs and
musical influences from the other, and the performers watch each other to
incorporate ideas into their own performances, the congregations remain
separate, often unaware of the music of their racial counterparts.
There was some black gospel recorded during the earliest part of the
twentieth century (the Fisk Jubilee Singers recorded before World War I) and
more recorded after "blues" or "race" became a source of recording material
beginning in 1920. During the period 1926-29 when record labels were
making field recordings, a large amount of gospel material was recorded.
These songs were recorded at the same time that early country and blues
were recorded by many of the same people. However, the Great Depression
curtailed recording during the 1930s, especially among black performers,
because there were few who could afford the records. Also, beginning in
1933, when Prohibition was repealed, there was less recording of gospel -
both black and white - because the jukeboxes became the major buyer of
records and tavern owners did not like gospel music on their jukeboxes.
(It hurt the sales of booze and tended to dampen the "atmosphere" of the
juke joints.)
After World War II, gospel music and secular music generally went their
separate ways, with gospel recorded on recording labels dedicated to gospel,
while secular music was recorded on secular labels.
55 The development of gospel music
Jackson, Cooke and Cleveland
Two movements within the church have proven instrumental in both gospel
music as well as secular music. The "Holiness movement" in the black church
and the "Pentecostal movement" in white churches nurtured a number of
early rock'n'roll pioneers, including Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Sam Cooke and others who came out of these churches. This first
generation of rock'n'rollers captured the spirit and frenzy of the Holiness
or Pentecostal movements in their secular music. This is the essential link
between gospel music and early rock'n'roll. However, later generations of
rock artists, especially those from Great Britain, did not have this connec-
tion with gospel music. Gospel music's influence on secular music tends,
therefore, to be through individual performers, not on the music as a whole.
(The only exceptions to this are the African American groups such as the
Four Tops and Temptations, who were direct descendants of the black gospel
quartets.)
In the 1950s and into the early 1960s the most important artists in black
gospel music were Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke. Both appealed first
to the black church audience, then crossed over to the white audience -
Mahalia in the gospel field while Sam Cooke made his greatest impact on
the white audience in the pop music world.
Mahalia Jackson was clearly gospel music's greatest superstar of this
period. Daughter of devout Baptist parents, she idolized Bessie Smith and
the blues influence carried over to her own style, although she never left the
gospel field. Initially, her repertoire was the Baptist hymns and it was the
hymn that held her heart at the end; here, she could pour out her soul, using
elements of the blues delivery to make each song a personal statement.
During her career, Mahalia was often tempted by others to use her rich and
powerful vocal talents to sing music other than gospel. However, the church
was embedded in her too deeply and, wracked by guilt, she returned to
gospel, where she was clearly most comfortable musically, spiritually, and
emotionally.
Mrs. Bess Berman signed Mahalia to Apollo Records, a small firm based
in New York, in 1946. Although the relationship with Berman was at times
volatile and argumentative, Mahalia produced a string of recordings over the
next eight years which were both brilliant and definitive. Her concerts during
this time were equally memorial and sometimes she would spend almost half
an hour on "Move On Up" or some hymn. Jackson became famous to white
American audiences and began to embody the quintessential gospel singer -
a black Kate Smith who was saintly, stately, and who sang with incredible
power. She had her own radio and television programs beginning in 1954,
the same year Columbia Records signed her and instigated a tremendous
56 Don Cusic
national publicity campaign on her behalf. A special feature in Life fol-
lowed as commercial success on Columbia catapulted her fame forward
even further. In the 1960s she championed the cause of Civil Rights with
Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had befriended, and sang at John
Kennedy's inauguration in 1 96 1 . When King was assassinated, she sang "Pre-
cious Lord" at his funeral. The final years were stormy times for Mahalia
and her image was tarnished after her marriage and divorce from musician
Sigmund Galloway. Still, she continued to record and tour - both interna-
tionally and in the United States - until her death at the beginning of 1972.
By this time, her name had become synonymous with Gospel Music and
she was an international celebrity.
The story of Sam Cooke is one that bears telling because Cooke was
the first gospel artist to cross over into the pop world. Marred by a tragic
ending, it is nevertheless a lesson in the appeal of gospel music to a young
audience and, ultimately, to the secular world. Born in Mississippi in 1931,
Sam Cook (no 'e') grew up in Chicago, where his father was a Church of
Christ Holiness minister. He joined his two sisters and brother in a group
called "The Singing Children" when he was nine and became a member of
the Highway QC's a few years later. This latter group was an offshoot of
the Soul Stirrers, perhaps the most popular black gospel quartet of the day,
who wanted to form a group of young singers as a sort of "farm club" for
the parent organization. Here, Cooke was coached by Soul Stirrer member
R. B. Robinson, who brought him into the Soul Stirrers when lead singer
R. H. Harris left in late 1950.
When Sam Cooke joined the Soul Stirrers they were already the biggest
name in black gospel quartet circles. Their sex appeal was also known but it
was Sam Cooke who brought the young people in droves to gospel concerts
and who became the first "sex symbol" in the music, which he used as a
launching pad into pop stardom. Along the way, he created a distinguishable
style characterized by his semi-yodel, developed into a first rate songwriter
in both the gospel and pop fields, and created the pattern of success which
so many others - from David Ruffin to Jerry Butler to Lou Rawls to Johnny
Taylor - sought to emulate. Cooke had just passed his twentieth birthday
when he sang on his first recordings with the Soul Stirrers in 1951 and
the first session yielded the Cooke penned hit, "Jesus Gave Me Water." His
singing style, which touched on imitations of Harris and some attempts at
"shouting" like other popular lead singers of the day, was quickly settling
into his own trademark of sophisticated sanctification, effortless emotions
which somehow still touched the depths of passion. Soon, he became the
rage of the gospel world as young girls lined up outside venues to wait for
him. Cooke, with his movie-star good looks, was the perfect male symbol -
young and pretty - with a voice that could send chills up any spine.
57 The development of gospel music
Cooke had flirted with the idea of crossing over to pop a number of years
before he actually did so. He wanted to appeal to the white audience - there
was more money, prestige, and fame there - and he knew he could do it best
through pop music. Still, he was reluctant to take the step because of the
usual inhibitions gospel singers feel when singing for "the world." It would
not be until 1957 when he did take that step, and even then he tried to step
back into the gospel world and have his feet in both worlds. But it could not
work that way. Cooke was certainly not the first singer to leave gospel for pop
music. Dinah Washington had done it years before and Ray Charles, only a
year older than Cooke but more a veteran in the recording studio (he had
begun recording in 1948 when he was eighteen), had shown the powerful
appeal inherent in gospel music when he took a traditional gospel song,
put some secular lyrics to it, and delivered it with the gusto and delivery
of a sanctified holiness preacher resulting in the hit, "I Gotta Woman" in
1954. This heralded the r&b explosion when a number of white teenagers
discovered black music and modified it into the rock'n'roll revolution that
began in 1956 with Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock"
and culminated with Sam Phillip's answer to his quest for a white man who
could sing like a black, Elvis Presley.
Other precedents for African American success in the white market were
the quartets like the Mills Brothers, Ink Spots and Orioles, who presented
a supper-club-type harmony on songs like "Crying in the Chapel." The key
year here is 1954. This is when Elvis made his first recordings in Memphis
for Sun Records, Roy Hamilton had a pop hit with the gospel song, "You'll
Never Walk Alone," and Ray Charles had a pop hit with a gospel-influenced
performance of the bawdy "I Got A Woman." Then in 1955 and 1956, a
succession of African Americans - beginning with Little Richard, Chuck
Berry, Fats Domino, the Coasters, and the Platters - opened up the musical
world for black artists to appeal to white audiences. It was a world ripe for
Sam Cooke.
The Soul Stirrers had been recording for the Specialty label, an indepen-
dent Los Angeles-based firm, established in 1949 and owned by Art Rupe.
Producer Bumps Blackwell was producing the group and decided to cut
Cooke on some pop songs, although Rupe was against the move since he
had been having success with gospel and did not want that jeopardized.
The first pop single from Cooke, entitled 'Loveable' and released under the
name Dale Cook in 1957, sold about 25,000 copies but raised Rupe's ire to
the point that it ended Cooke's and Blackwell's career with the label. Since
Rupe owed Blackwell money, there was a deal settled where the producer
would get the unreleased tapes from the pop session he had cut with Cooke.
He took these over to another small label, Keen Records, which put out "You
Send Me" in the fall of 1957. It quickly went to the number one position
58 Don Cusic
on both the r&b and pop charts. That began Sam Cooke's pop career and
songs like "Wonderful World," "Only Sixteen" and "Everybody Loves to Cha
Cha Cha," which he either wrote or co-wrote, followed before he went with
R.C.A. There, his career continued to thrive with the release of his third sin-
gle, "Chain Gang" and culminating with perhaps his finest song, "A Change
Is Gonna Come," written after he had heard "Blowin in the Wind" for the
first time. This became a hit after his death in 1964.
Sam Cooke showed that a performer with gospel roots could have a
major effect on the pop world, that the talent of gospel performers was first
rate and the church - via musicians and singers who received their early
training and experience there - would be a major influence on pop music
in the rock'n'roll revolution from the mid-fifties through the sixties. Since
the rise of soul music paralleled the rise of the Civil Rights movement this
places the career of Sam Cooke in the strategic center where gospel, soul,
and social activism all fused to bring about a major social revolution.
In the 1970s, James Cleveland became arguably the most important
individual in traditional black gospel, because of his influence on other
singers, for his help and support of other acts, as an artist whose records
had an impact in gospel, and as the founder and president of the Gospel
Music Workshop of America. During a period in the late 1960s and early
1970s, when African Americans struggled for self-respect as well as respect
from society, Cleveland helped to provide that respect for those who were
involved as singers in churches and who attended his convention. With the
slogan "Where Everybody is Somebody" and the underlying theology that
everyone is someone important in the eyes of God, Cleveland's convention
not only helped singers and musicians with their music, it also lifted their
hearts, minds, and spirits.
Thomas Dorsey had been the first to gather black choir members together
for a convention in 1932. Cleveland's first convention was held in Detroit
in 1968 and attracted over 3,000 registrants. The next year almost 5,000
attended the convention in Philadelphia and in 1970 over 5,000 came to
St. Louis for the gathering. From there, they held conventions in Dallas,
Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, Kansas City, and New York. At each of the
conventions, more classes and seminars were added to help choir members
and musicians as well as radio announcers and choir directors. Each night
choirs from numerous churches performed and Cleveland often dropped in
to perform with a choir or sometimes solo with just a keyboard player (often
Billy Preston). He was clearly the center of attention and the magnet that
pulled all the disparate forces together. Cleveland's convention managed
to speak to the black experience and gratified a desire for significance in a
world that often treated blacks as second-class citizens. It made Cleveland
more than just another gospel singer.
59 The development of gospel music
He had originally made his mark as a piano player, developing a hard,
driving style when he played behind Roberta Martin. As a singer, he was
influenced by Myrtle Scott of the Roberta Martin Singers and Eugene Smith,
also of that group. The flamboyance of Smith was combined with the in-
fluences of ballad singer Robert Anderson, jazzman Louis Armstrong and
blues singer Dinah Washington, once the lead singer for Sallie Martin. From
Washington in particular, Cleveland discovered how to weave gospel and
blues into a single style.
James Cleveland was energetic, bright and ambitious. He would go any-
where and ask anyone for a chance to sing and play. In the mid-fifties,
Cleveland's arrangements caught the ears of the gospel world as he fused
some secular blues and jazz influences into black gospel. He was a member
of Albertina Walker's legendary Caravans and worked with such greats as
Dorothy Norwood, Inez Andrews, Imogene Green and Norsalus McKissick.
He was the architect of the strong, pushing gospel sound, a sound that drove
a song. His gruff vocal style came after his voice changed from soprano and,
as he drove himself to sing more and more, this fractured his once-beautiful
voice into a deep growl. He was not a pretty singer, by anyone's standards,
but was one of the most effective in putting across a gospel song and pulling
emotions out of a crowd.
After recording for several labels with various groups, Cleveland signed
with Savoy Records and released records with the Cleveland All- Stars
(featuring Billy Preston on keyboards) and the Gospel Chimes (which
featured Jessy Dixon). Finally, Fred Mendelsohn, head of Savoy, teamed
Cleveland with the Angelic Choir of Nutley, New Jersey, and that's where he
found his niche. Working with this choir, as well as a number of others across
the country, Cleveland put out records that featured the choirs as a back-
ground and on the choruses while he worked with the verses, molding them
to his own style. The 1 980s sawhim fall out of vogue with some of the younger
black gospel performers and fans. While they moved into the slick, smooth
sound influenced by r&b and disco, Cleveland remained with his raw, gutsy,
blues-based soul sound. The result was a split in black gospel which resul-
ted in two overlapping factions usually referred to as contemporary and
traditional.
Conclusion
There have been large changes and progress in black gospel and this has
brought it closer to mainstream music and allowed many gospel groups to
sound more like the polished performers heard on the radio. The economic
panacea of selling black music to white buyers has long been a part of the
60 Don Cusic
music industry and now permeates black gospel, letting black gospel have
a larger audience, but watering it down from a raw sound to one more
palatable for commercial tastes.
Indeed, in many ways they have run into one another; black gospel has
influenced white gospel musically while the white gospel field has influenced
black gospel from a marketing perspective. White gospel has developed
three distinct "genres" in the late twentieth century. First was Southern
Gospel, an extension of the singing schools in the South, which evolved
into quartets and family groups who, musically, are akin to country music
while their harmonies are reminiscent of barbershop quartets. Second is
Contemporary Christian Music, which tends to mirror pop music in its
sound. This evolved from the Jesus Revolution in the late 1960s, a counter
to the counter-culture where young people with long hair and blue jeans
sang about Jesus to rock music. Finally, there is "church" or "praise" music,
which is music sung in churches by choirs and congregations. These songs
blend the old-time hymns (some of which are still used) with contemporary
songs written by songwriters steeped in pop music. Contemporary Christian
Music dominates radio airplay on "Christian" stations and sales in Christian
bookstores.
Black gospel does not have the network or organization for its music
like white gospel. While contemporary Christian music has the network of
Christian bookstores to carry their product and a number of gospel radio
stations, as well as TV programs and print media to showcase the music,
black gospel is generally sold in independently owned record stores (called
Mom and Pop stores) in the African American sections of town and heard
on black radio stations as a one-hour program. Christian bookstores have
been reluctant to stock black gospel, perhaps not trusting black American
Christianity as well as not finding a great demand for the distinctive black
gospel record. There are, however, a number of blacks who have become
increasingly acceptable to this white market; unfortunately, the gospel per-
former almost has to choose his own audience and those black performers
who have whites buying their albums can often find they have lost their
black audience.
5 Twelve key recordings
GRAEME M. BOONE
A crucial factor in recognizing blues and gospel songs as what they are, is the
way they sound. Through close focus on twelve recorded performances, this
chapter illuminates characteristic details of form, style, genre, and historical
period. These recordings should not necessarily be understood as the "best"
of their type, but as examples which typify the features under discussion.
"Fred McDowell's Blues"
Fred McDowell, voice and guitar; Miles Pratcher, guitar; Fanny
Davis, comb.
Recorded September 21, 1959 in Como, Mississippi.
Recorded in early stereo during a field trip by Alan Lomax, "Fred McDowell's
Blues" is suggestive of a very old style of folk blues; the generic title reflects its
non-commercial origin. The two guitars provide a steady foundation, with
Pratcher setting down a regular "boom-chick" beat in a swing rhythm and
McDowell adding a simple repeating melodic pattern or other more promi-
nent lines. The guitars offer a riveting support, and foil, to McDowell's voice.
Their pace is upbeat, and speeds up during the song; this is characteristic
of older folk blues, as is the single "drone" chord to which they remain
anchored throughout. McDowell's guitar reinforces Pratcher's rhythm, but
he plays other lines too, often doubled by the kazoo-like sound of Davis'
comb. He tends to play a simple, repetitive riff, and when he sings, his guitar
loosely follows his vocal melody. He also takes two brief instrumental solos
in the middle of the song, similar to the lines he plays while singing. In the
solos you can hear especially clearly his use of a slide, making a fluid and
sharp-edged sound similar to that of the comb.
McDowell's voice is fairly rough and tense, and its vibrato is irregular; his
articulation is loose, his words not always easy to understand. His singing
is unhurried and rhythmically free, floating over the pulse of beats and
bars (see Ex. 5.1). The vocal lines tend to begin around the second beat
of the bar, and accented syllables commonly fall in syncopated fashion on
weak beats; but each line is different, and placed somewhat unpredictably
in relation to the great open spaces of the accompaniment. The song has a
loose but recognizable tune, organized into three phrases that correspond
62 Graeme M. Boone
BEATS
LYRICS
1 2
Lord
3
I'm
4
1
2
goin
3
down
4
south
1
2
ba by
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
I believe
3
l
4
will
1
2
carry
3
my
4
girl
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
Lord
3
I'm
4
1
2
goin
3
down
4
so-
1
uth
2
3
4
1 2
3
believe
4
i
1
will
2
3
4
1
2
carry
3
my
4
girl
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
Lord
3
they
4
[tell
1
not
2
to
3
4
bry
1
2
you]*
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
ba-
3
by
4
dey's
1
2
out
3
dis
4
world.
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1 2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
"The words are difficult to decipher here. Lomax transcribes this line as "Lord, they say them doctors."
5.1. Lyrics and rhythm in the first stanza of "Fred McDowell's Blues."
to the three textual lines of each stanza. In the second stanza, for example,
the first half of the first line is almost entirely pinned to a high melodic
note (the octave: "Lord I'm goin down to Louisiana ..."); the second half-
line moves gradually downward, to conclude an octave lower (on the root or
tonic: ". . . I'm gonna buy me amojo hand"). The second line is functionally
identical to the first, differing only in slight details ("Lord I'm goin' down
to Louisiana, I'm gonna buy me a mojo hand"). The third line, by contrast,
begins on the bottom note, then rises and falls back to the same note twice,
making a double-arch shape ("I'm gonna fix my baby so she won't have no
other man"). The distinction between a higher first pair of lines and a lower
concluding line is common in blues melody. Also typical are the two basic
phrase shapes (descending line; arch-shaped line) and the division of each
line into two halves. But McDowell's singing is flexible. In the first stanza,
for example, his third line starts high like the first two lines, rather than low;
in the final stanza, the third line in drawn out to twice its expected length by
repetition of its first half. Such unpredictable elements illustrate the deeply
63 Twelve key recordings
improvisatory quality of blues singing, and of McDowell's style in particular.
The open-ended, shouted qualities of his style are also characteristic of the
field holler, or outdoor worksong sung by African Americans in the days of
slavery and sharecropping. This is another feature suggestive of early folk
blues.
The wailing quality of McDowell's voice and guitar has much to do with
his use of blue notes. These are flexible melodic pitches (or pitch "spaces"),
opposable to the fixed pitches (or pitch "points") that form the basis for
most melody, and many musical instruments, in the Western traditions. Blue
notes are commonly situated around the third, fifth, and seventh degrees
of the scale. The effect of these notes is striking; it includes moaning, crying,
and other expressive vocal sounds that cannot be captured within a common
fixed-pitch melody, but that have musical value in the blues. Blue notes also
have a harmonic dimension, since their fluid intonation (most famously, the
blue third) creates dissonance against the fixed note that underpins them
in supportive chords (such as the major third in Pratcher's tonic chord).
McDowell's singing, like his guitar playing, is full of blue notes; in his first
line, for example, there are several - "Lord I'm goin' down south baby, I 7
believe 7 1 will 5 carry 5 my 3 girl" - although no simple labeling can capture
the richness of his intonations. Significantly, he never sings on the second
or sixth degree of the scale. His melodic language is pentatonic, touching
on only five scale degrees, of which three involve blue notes (1, 3, 4, 5, 7).
The lyrics of the song are in simple blues form. Each stanza comprises
three lines: the first two are identical, the third rhyming (line structure: a ab;
rhyme scheme: a a a). Poetically as well as musically, the repetition of the a
line allows the performer to reaffirm an idea or feeling. That build-up leads
to the release of the concluding b line, with its rhyming word and its own
consequential idea or feeling. The repetition of the a line serves another
purpose also: it gives the performer time to think about a b line, and is
therefore useful when stanzas are improvised or modified on the spot, as
often happens. In this recording the third stanza consists of three identical
a lines, without any contrasting b line. This seems to have been a feature of
early blues, in which the antecedent/ consequent format of a a b was not so
firmly entrenched. Here again, "Fred McDowell's Blues" is suggestive of an
old style.
Do the lyrics, taken together, tell a coherent story? It depends upon your
point of view. Some stanzas appear in many blues songs, and their inclusion
could have been simply improvised. Then again, we can infer a progression of
ideas centering on the singer's mate. First he wants to take her with him (first
stanza) ; then it becomes clear that he wants to control her (second) . But that
leads to thoughts of sadness (third) and suicide (fourth) , implying the futility
of his efforts with her, or more broadly, in life. The reality may reconcile both
64 Graeme M. Boone
views. Blues lyrics that circulate and recombine in countless songs tend to
center on elemental issues of personal suffering and survival, sex, and love;
individual songs will draw on this poetic resource, arriving at an individual
presentation that paints its own picture, but also relates to other songs and to
universal blues themes. The simplicity and open-endedness of images such
as McDowell's only makes them more evocative; in this manner, good blues
singing can take on an existential dimension, communicating the deepest
emotions with an incisive, uncluttered directness.
"Cross Road Blues" (take 1)
Robert Johnson, voice and guitar.
Recorded November 27, 1936 in San Antonio, Texas.
Due to its remarkable expression and subject matter, "Cross Road Blues"
is one of Robert Johnson's best-known songs. Its style is rooted in the folk
blues tradition, but reflects the virtuosity and self-consciously distinct style
of a professional musician. Johnson's rhythm is similar to McDowell's in its
intensity, its regular, swinging beat, and its gradually quickening tempo; but
Johnson is playing alone, and his guitar has to satisfy the roles of rhythm,
chords, and melodic highlights all at once. His pace is also slower, with a
plodding, insistent quality that recalls boogie-woogie piano style. The effect
of the song is no less energetic, though, thanks to his rapid ornaments and
stream of musical ideas.
Johnson's bars and phrases are stretched or compressed at whim. Here or
there the four-beat bar literally skips a beat, especially just before the begin-
ning of stanzas; and pauses between phrases are drawn out to make room for
the spinning out of an idea on guitar (see Ex. 5.2). There is some similarity
to McDowell's approach, but Johnson leaves much less open space, and his
volatile solo guitar style gives his music a dramatic edge. From time to time
he strums the beat on the low strings alone; more commonly he strums other
strings too, beating out rich chordal riffs that alternate between the mid-
and high range of the guitar, a diversified technique that leaves much of the
texture implied. Like McDowell, Johnson plays high riffs with a slide, giving
them an especially liquid, wailing quality. Occasionally, he also strikes just
one note and lets it ring in the air for a moment. This occurs as a response
to words in the middle of the third line of each stanza, e.g., "I believe to my
soul now - [twang] - old Bobby's sinkin' down" (riff d in Ex. 5.2). Johnson
seems to be having fun with the guitar, at the same time demonstrating
mastery of its possibilities and confidence that the listener will be able to
hang on for the ride.
65 Twelve key recordings
chords i i
beats 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
riffs (a) a
lyrics I went to the cross road
I I
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
a a
tell down on my knees
I I
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
b1 b2
IV IV
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
c c
I went to the cross road fell down on my knees
I
12 3 4
a
i i
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
b1 b2
v v
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Asked the Lord above have mer -cy now save poor Bob ifyou please.
I I
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
b1 b2
5.2. Lyrics, guitar riffs, rhythm, and chord progression in the first stanza of "Cross Road Blues" by Robert
Johnson.
The restless energy of Johnson's guitar makes for a fascinating relation-
ship with his voice. McDowell, too, played high-pitched guitar riffs while
singing, but Johnson's riffs are distinct musical ideas (numbered a through
d in Ex. 5.2), following their own path through the stanza. They anchor
the rhythm by beginning at the same place in each bar, namely, the first
offbeat, whereas his vocal phrases move around quite a bit. As a result his
voice and guitar compete, in a high-powered musical dialogue. An essential
factor here, as in McDowell's singing, is the pause after each line, and shorter
pause after each half-line: these breaks allow the meaning of the words to
sink in, a new breath to be drawn, expectation to rise concerning the next
phrase, and the instrument(s) to respond to the voice. McDowell's guitar re-
treated to a supportive role during his pauses, but in "Cross Road Blues" the
pauses between vocal lines are filled by the attention-grabbing guitar riffs.
66 Graeme M. Boone
As Example 5.2 shows, there are guitar responses at the half-line ("I went
down to the crossroad ..."—>■ riff a), as well as the full line (". . . fell down
onmy knees" — > riffsa,bl,b2). These responses are prominent enough that
we do not even notice - unless we stop to think about it - that there is no
separate guitar solo in the middle of the song.
"Cross Road Blues" also differs from "Fred McDowell's Blues" in fol-
lowing a distinct chord progression: I-IV-I-V-I, evoked on the guitar by
means of its various riffs and supportive lines, and remaining the same for
each stanza. This progression is so thoroughly identified with blues that it is
simply called the blues progression. McDowell's drone chord shows that it
is not indispensable to the blues, but judging by the historical record and by
blues music made today, it stands alongside the lyrical form and the musical
style as a defining component of the music.
Johnson's singing voice is higher and more mercurial than McDowell's,
and his vibrato is more agitated. But like McDowell, his tone is a bit rough
and tense, his intonation is flexible and bluesy, and he articulates the words
loosely. The melodies of the two recordings, while clearly distinguishable
from each other, likewise share important features. Both tend to begin the
first two lines on a high note and end them on the low, tonic note; both have a
contrasting, less active third line, in keeping with the settling-down effect
at the end of the stanza, also onto the tonic note; both are improvisatory,
making the melody sound fresh and different each time. And like McDowell,
Johnson uses a pentatonic vocal scale, avoiding the second and sixth scale
degrees. The poetic and musical form of the blues, as well as commonalities
of style, contribute to these similarities.
The words to "Cross Road Blues" give a highly individual twist to this
song. In the rural South, the crossroad, leading to and from many places,
was itself an important place for travel and commerce, and therefore also a
place of possibilities and danger. Johnson plunges us into a mood of anxiety
and even desperation, without telling us exactly why. In the first stanza, the
crossroad seems like a point of fateful, perhaps spiritual, encounter; this
recalls the folk theme of a crossroad as the scene of a Faustian meeting with
the Devil. He then proclaims his loneliness and isolation (stanza 2), and the
inevitable, transitory passage of day and of his own life, with reference to
fellow bluesman Willie Brown (3 and 4). The final stanza, making reference
to a "sweet woman," suggests that even love and sex, those staples of blues and
of life, cannot protect Johnson from his fate. Approaching the momentous
crossroad, he does not know which way to go and finds himself utterly alone.
Johnson delivers these lines simply, and with a sense of humor matched by
his playful guitar style; it is when we stop to think about them that their
dark meanings begin to emerge and coalesce.
67 Twelve key recordings
CHORDS 1
BEATS 1
CORNET
lyrics I hate
2
I 7
3
4
IV
1
2
V
3
4
to
see
the evening
sun
go
1
1
2
3
4
1 7
1
2
3
4
down.
IV
1
2
3
4
b V |7
1
2
V
3
4
I
hate to
see
the evening
sun
go
1
1
2
3
4
I
1
2
3
4
down.
V
1
2
3
4
II 7
1
2
V
3
4
It makes me
think I'm
on my last
go
I
1
I 7
2
dim.
3
IVm
4
I
1
dim.
2
V
3
4
round.
5.3. Lyrics, cornet interjections, rhythm, and chord progression in the first stanza of "St. Louis
Blues" as recorded by Bessie Smith.
mi
"St. Louis Blues"
Bessie Smith, voice; Louis Armstrong, cornet; Fred Longshaw,
organ.
Recorded January 14, 1925 in New York City.
Composer: William Christopher Handy.
Historically speaking, the "St. Louis Blues" is probably the most famous of
all blues. It started out as a written composition - a musical blueprint, as it
were, scored for voice and piano only, and lacking in blue notes and other
details that can't be written down in common notation. Poetically, the com-
position is mostly in a-a-b blues form; its chords are based on the standard
I-IV-I-V-I blues progression, but show interpolations as well (affecting
bars 1, 2, 6, and 10-12; see Ex. 5.3), reflecting a more sophisticated har-
monic vocabulary typical of urbane popular music. Lhe melodic language
is similarly sophisticated, using all degrees of the scale plus several chromatic
inflections. Lhe rhythm is arranged in a neat twelve-bar pattern, divided into
three equal segments corresponding to the three poetic lines. Each four-bar
segment is divided into two halves, each of about two bars' length, the first
half containing one sung poetic line and the second half providing space for
a response from the instrumental accompaniment. Further, each poetic line
68 Graeme M. Boone
CHORDS
CORNET
LYRICS
lm
1
2
O
4
lm
■\
2
O
4
Saint Louis
wo- man
wears
a
dia-mond
V
1
2
3
4
V
1
2
3
4
ring
pulls the
V
-i
I
o
3
4
V
1
2
3
4
man
a-
round
by
her
a- pron
lm
1
2
3
4
lm
1
2
3
4
strings.
lm
■|
2
Q
o
A
4
lm
I
O
d.
3
A
4
Wasn't for
powder
and this
store-bought
hair
V
1
2
3
4
V
1
2
3
4
V
1
2
3
4
V
1
2
3
4
the man
I love
wouldn't go
no-
where
lm
1
2
II
3
4
V7
1
2
3
4
no-
where.
[I
got them...]
5.4. Lyrics, cornet interjections, rhythm, and chord progression in stanza 3 of "St. Louis Blues,"
as recorded by Bessie Smith.
is itself divided into two halves, lasting about one bar each, with a break in
the middle ("I hate to see" - pause - "the evening sun go down"). In sum,
Handy 's rhythmic format is identical to Johnson's, except that it has been
ironed out into perfect regularity.
Handy's melody follows blues form, with the second phrase a variant of
the first. Each phrase also falls into two halves, like the poetic lines. Instead of
starting high and falling low, its a phrases adopt a more demure shape, rising
and then falling onto the tonic note in a double arch. This style is common
in blues melody; we heard something like it in McDowell's b line. Used as
an a line, however, it suggests less of a shouting and more of a moaning
style. In the absence of true blue notes, which cannot be written down in
traditional sheet-music notation, Handy cleverly switches back and forth
between major and minor thirds (e.g., "/hate to see . . ." = major third, plus
brief minor- third grace note; "the morning sun go down" = minor third).
There is more to the composition than a blues scheme: its third stanza is
sixteen bars long rather than twelve, has a I-V-V-I progression rather than
I-IV-I-V-I, is in a-a-b-b poetic form rather than a a b, and switches to a
minor key (see Ex. 5.4). The explanation for this difference is to be found
69 Twelve key recordings
in the A-A-B-A form of popular song at that time: after two repetitions
of an initial section (A), a contrasting section was sung (B), and the initial
section then returned to round off the song. "St. Louis Blues" follows just
this pattern: its A (blues) sections are stanzas 1, 2, and 4 and its contrasting
B section is stanza 3. Ingeniously, then, the song is simultaneously cast in
blues and popular-song form.
The rhythmic and formal regularity of "St. Louis Blues" is due to popu-
lar musical conventions and notation, which by their very nature encourage
a predictable consistency suitable for dancing and for a variety of perform-
ing groups and contexts. Handy's syncopation is similarly controlled; he
even adds a familiar Latin touch by including a tango rhythm in the piano
introduction (which, incidentally, was not included in our recording). With
"St. Louis Blues," then, we pass from the relative idiosyncrasy of unwritten
folk-derived styles, preserved in recordings, to high commodification, mass
audiences, and urban environment of popular song disseminated in pub-
lished scores. "St. Louis Blues" is a good example of what has been labeled
"city blues," as opposed to the preceding "country blues" styles.
The most famous city-blues singers were women, and the most famous
among them was Bessie Smith. Our recording of "St. Louis Blues" was made
at the height of her popularity, in 1925, and it also features the young cornet
star, Louis Armstrong, whose stunning improvisational abilities were setting
the new world of jazz on its ear at just this time. The third performer on
this recording, Fred Longshaw, was a popular and capable accompanist for
recordings of the period. The use of harmonium outside of church may
seem strange to modern ears, but it was common in homes and theatres
around the country.
The recording generally follows the form, harmonies, and melody of
the sheet music, but the musicians add significant elements too, beginning
with Armstrong's superb cornet. Because, as we have seen, blues form in-
cludes a call-and-response element, and because Armstrong's role in the
song is to respond to Smith's vocal lines, his sinuous improvisations feel
completely appropriate even though they do not figure in the sheet music at
all. Meanwhile, Longshaw successfully adapts Handy's piano part to suit the
softer and slower attack of the organ, while Smith's singing brings Handy's
tune to life in a powerful, unforgettable way. Like other city-blues singers,
she tended to take her blues at a slow pace, which allowed her to dig into blue
notes and draw out the pathos of the subject matter. She follows the broad
outlines of Handy's written melody but constantly transforms it, in true
blues fashion, to bring out the individuality of each moment. Her voice is
extraordinarily powerful, and bends the tune in a subtle way that, of course,
cannot be notated. "Feeling tomorrow like I feel today": this line is a good
example of how she presses into the microtonal spaces inside a blue note,
making a sinuous melody that almost hurts in the strength of its bluesy
70 Graeme M. Boone
dissonance. The recording only begins to evoke the impact of her perfor-
mances, which, according to eyewitnesses, could make listeners weep with
emotion.
The lyrics of the song express a suffering that could be linked either to a
specific situation or to a general, existential one. The first stanza expresses a
morbid sadness; the second a desire to leave town. The third stanza explains
this situation, comparing a woman from St. Louis, who has fine things and
control over her man, to the speaker, who has neither. The final stanza gets
to the heart of the matter: the singer has the "St. Louis blues," bemoaning
the coldness and distance of her lover. To go with this summation, Handy
introduces a new melody that is the most catchy, "riffy" one of all, a true
hook that draws listeners and musicians back to the song over and over
again. It has a repetitive rhythmic bite, and it leans particularly hard on the
blue third, alternating with the tonic note: "I've got the St. Louis blues just as
blue as / can be." In this fashion, Handy "signifies" the blues in a heightened
way, one that in almost any setting will be understood as bluesy. It is a
masterful touch, one that has surely contributed to the legendary stature of
the song.
"Rock the Joint"
Jimmy Preston and His Prestonians: including Jimmy Preston,
lead voice, alto saxophone; Danny Turner, tenor saxophone.
Recorded May 1949, in Philadelphia.
Composers: Harry Crafton, Wendell Keane, Harry Bagby.
During the swing era a variety of African American styles emerged that com-
bined elements of jazz, blues, popular song, and earthy dance music. Jimmy
Preston's "Rock the Joint" exemplifies the transition from smooth thirties
swing, via r&b, toward the hard edge that would characterize rock'n'roll in
the 1950s. It includes lead and backup singers, accompanied by alto and
tenor saxophones, piano, bass, and drums. The tempo is fast, and rendered
in a shuffle (swing) rhythm with a very strong backbeat (on snare and
piano), bound to a rollicking boogie line (on piano and bass, doubled at
first by unison horns). The harmonies follow a straightforward blues pro-
gression, with few of the interpolations typical of more sophisticated jazz.
The effect is intense, celebratory, and highly danceable; the title and lyrics
evoke dancing and never use the word "blues."
The lyric form is that of refrain blues, a common alternative to the simpler
verse-blues form of the preceding examples. It retains the basic sectional
pattern of a a b, but reorganized to set "verse" lyrics to the a section and
"refrain" lyrics to the -a-b sections. Here, the refrain involves a repeated riff,
71 Twelve key recordings
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're gon-na
1
1
DRINK and
(2)
rock
(3)
both
(4)
young
1
1
(2)
and old
(3)
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're
1
1
(2)
gon-na
(3)
do
(4)
the
|7
(1)
jel-
ly
2
roll.
3
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're gon-na
IV
1
ROCK
2
3
4
rock
IV
1
this
2
joint,
3
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're gon-na
1
1
ROCK
2
3
4
rock
I
1
this
2
joint,
3
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're gon-na
1
ROCK
2
3
4
rock
V
1
this
2
joint,
3
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
4
We're gon-na
ii
1
ROCK
2
THIS
V
3
JOINT
4
To-night.
I
1
2
3
(4)
5.5. Lyrics, rhythm, and chord progression in "Rock the Joint."
one so catchy that a whole separate chorus is made out of it, as well as a tag
ending: "We're gonna rock this joint tonight." The tune fills up the stanza
space, leaving only a little room for call and response between voices and
instruments, but its riffs and interplay between solo (for the verse lines) and
backup singers (for the rest) more than make up for that. The verse melody
leans on the seventh degree of the scale ("We're gonna drink and rock both
young and old, we're gonna do . . . "), then rises to the octave for climactic
effect (. . . "the jeZlyroll") before falling to the tonic below. This leads straight
into the refrain, whose bluesy riff falls from the fifth degree to the third and,
ultimately, the tonic. The high first line (verse) and lower concluding lines
(refrain) recall the melodies of McDowell and Johnson; and Preston also
uses an extroverted, shouting vocal style. His melodic language is based on
the same pentatonic vocabulary as theirs, too, except that the sixth degree
is sung once in the tune (in the second line: "We're gonna do") and used
again for effect as the last note of the song.
The boogie accompaniment intensifies the rhythm of the words, which
reflect their subject perfectly as they alternate between onbeat and offbeat
placement, suggesting both the strength and the swing of rocking (and con-
trasting, in this respect, with the subtle, unpredictable vocal rhythm of the
first two songs). This alternation is shown in Example 5.5, with strong on-
beat syllables shown in small capitals and strong offbeat syllables shown in
italics. The basic riff, "we're gonna rock . . . ," ends on the downbeat of the
bar, followed after a pause by ". . . rock this joint" sung entirely on offbeats
by the backing chorus, as if by rocking the beat so strongly they could shake
72 Graeme M. Boone
the pillars of your body and soul, if not the dance hall. In the last line of the
stanza, the two halves are finally merged into one: "we're gonna rock this
joint ..." the last three words falling square onto the beats of the penulti-
mate bar - a masterful shift onto the beat that brings everything together,
followed by the clinching word ". . . Tonight" with its final syncopated bite.
Needless to say, the endless repetition of these words drives the point of
the song home with perfect intensity: this is music not to draw you into the
singer's troubles, fears, or hopes, but to get you right out onto the dance
floor.
Solid basis in the blues, predominance of riffing, upbeat tempo, boogie
influence, hard rhythmic drive, and dance-oriented lyrics in a jazz-derived
band: these were classic elements of dance-oriented r&b in this era.
The saxophone solos include similar heightened elements, by honking
(i.e., overblowing), buzzing (i.e., singing into the horn while playing), and
shrieking high notes. Perhaps most remarkable of all, though, is the influ-
ence of gospel church style, building on the strong rhythm with intense
and spontaneous interjections from the group, especially in the instrumen-
tal episodes, to suggest a community of shared ecstasy in which everyone
has a voice.
"(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man"
Muddy Waters, vocal and electric guitar; Little Walter,
harmonica; Jimmy Rogers, electric guitar; Otis Spann, piano;
Willie Dixon, electric bass; Fred Below, drums.
Recorded January 7, 1954 in Chicago.
Composer: Willie Dixon.
No blues style has been more influential since 1950 than the "Chicago"
style, forged by transplanted southern African Americans who adapted their
downhome approach to the world of urban Chicago and the new possibilities
of electric amplification. If there is a primary figure in this group, it would
have to be Muddy Waters. "Hoochie Coochie Man," composed by fellow
bluesman Willie Dixon, offers a fine example of Waters' mature style, having
the full complement of his fifties band with two guitars, piano, harmonica,
and prominent drums. The band's signature timbre, featuring distorted
amplification and strong reverb, supports the powerful wail of Waters' un-
forgettable voice and gives powerful reinforcement to the lyrics.
At the beginning one is almost startled by the alternation of a loud riff,
played in heavy, unhurried counterpoint by all the instruments together,
and an echoing silence. Leading the riff is the bluesy, liquid-molten wail of
Little Walters' harmonica. The riff, and the silence, are repeated nine times
73 Twelve key recordings
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
LYRICS
4
1
(2)
(3)
4
1 (2) (3)
The
gypsy woman
told my mother,
before I was born
CHORDS
BEATS
4
1
(2)
(3)
4
1 (2) (3)
BAND
LYRICS
1 got a boy
child's comin,
he's gonna be a son of a gun
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
4
1
(2)
(3)
4
1 (2) (3)
He's gonna make pretty womens
jump and shout
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
4
1
(2)
(3)
4
1 2 3
Then the world want to know
what's this all a- bout
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
LYRICS
4
IV
1
2
3
4
IV
1 2 3
But you know I'm he-re,
e- verybody
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
LYRICS
4
1
2
3
4
1 2 3
knows I'm here,
CHORDS
V
2
3
IV
4 12 3
BEATS
BAND
LYRICS
verybody
4
1
Well
you knowl'm th
3 hoo- chie
coo- chie man,
e- verybody
CHORDS
BEATS
BAND
LYRICS
4
1 2
4
1 2 3
knows I'm here.
5.6. Lyrics, instrumental/vocal alternation, rhythm, and chord progression in "Hoochie Coochie Man."
in all. After two iterations Waters begins singing in the spaces between
riffs, setting his fateful lyrics to hover in the silence like a call, answered by
the affirmations of his band. Eventually the stop/start style gives way to a
continuous playing as Waters shifts from the gypsy woman's old predictions
to the present moment: the hoochie coochie man is here now, and everyone
knows it.
The later stanzas continue to expound on Waters' dark, supernatural
power over women, and they follow the same format, that of refrain blues:
each stanza begins with four lines (eight half-lines) of verse lyrics, set to the
initial I chord, and ends with two lines of refrain lyrics, set to the remaining
chords. As Example 5.6 shows, the length of the verse section is eight bars
as opposed to the normal four, making a total of sixteen bars for the form
as a whole. The extra four bars of verse allow Waters to amplify his hoochie
coochie narrative, as well as the dramatic interplay of silence and sound
74 Graeme M. Boone
leading up to the refrain. The lyrics are so prominent, and their expressive
message so compelling, that (as in "Cross Road Blues") the lack of a separate
instrumental solo is not missed.
A closer look at the first stanza, shown in Example 5.6, illuminates some
of what is so dramatic about its performance. With his strong, rough voice,
Waters sings the verse lines entirely off the downbeat, in that space left
between the instrumental riffs, immediately creating tension between the
downbeat, as fundamental rhythmic anchor, and his own authority. The
two finally collide on "what's this all about," preparing the very different
lyric rhythm of the chorus: now Waters' phrases, rather than hovering in
the middle of the bars (beats 2-3), lean hard on the downbeat, once directly
("I'm the hoochie coochie man") and otherwise indirectly through intense
syncopation around the fourth beat ("I'm here"). These rhythms convey
both intentness of meaning and a potent sense of swing. As for the melody,
Waters' chanted delivery of the verse lines makes it different from any of
those we've discussed so far: they are mostly recited on the tonic degree and
accented by the blue third. During the chorus Waters finally lets out his giant
shouting voice, which abruptly rips up to the seventh degree ("everybody
knows I'm here") , returns to it for the naming that defines the song ("I'm the
hoochie coochie man"), and caps that with a unique rise to the octave in the
final phrase (amplifying "everybody") before falling back down to settle on
the tonic. Earlier, we noted Jimmy Preston's use of a climactic high note
late in the stanza; Waters uses the same idea, along with the same penta-
tonic language, occasionally touching on the sixth degree ("I'm the hoochie
coochie man"). Here, the effect is one of virile power, first intently brooding
and then, at just the right moment, roaring.
"The Thrill Is Gone"
B. B. King, vocal and lead electric guitar; Hugh McCracken,
backup guitar; Paul Harris, electric piano; Gerald Jemmott,
electric bass; Herbie Lovelle, drums; string orchestra arranged by
Bert DeCoteaux.
Recorded June 24 or 25, 1969 in New York City.
Composers: Roy Hawkins, Rick Darnell.
If Muddy Waters led the way in developing the saltiest-sounding blues, his
contemporary B. B. King, from Memphis Tennessee, did the same for the
sweetest. King favored the rich, relatively clean bell-like tone of a hollow-
body Gibson for much of his career (model ES-335, contrasting with Muddy
Waters' hardbody Fender telecaster), and he tried, as he noted more than
once, to "make it sing like the human voice" - in particular his own voice,
75 Twelve key recordings
which is celebrated for its warm timbre, fine vibrato, and sincere depth of
expression. He also favored toned-down themes for his lyrics, emphasizing
love, desire, and loss, but steering clear of misogyny, violence, and other
darker themes. No B. B. King song is better known than "The Thrill Is
Gone," a popular hit recorded at the time of his comeback in the late 1960s.
The song combines the solid foundation of King's signature style with the
influence of contemporary rock and soul music, including a tremolo-laden
electric piano, booming electric bass, orchestral string section, and straight
(rather than swing) rhythm. The form is twelve-bar verse blues, with a twist:
it is in a minor key, which lends an element of pathos to the song (as it did also
in the third stanza of "St. Louis Blues"), matching the lyrics, which express
almost unrelieved sadness and loss. King uses his voice and his guitar with
equal skill to delve into this mood.
The vocal melody is pentatonic, and based on a classic motive, falling
from the blue fifth through the blue third to the tonic; there has been a
variant of it in every song I've analyzed, with or without an arch shape, and
it is basic to his style:
(Th') thrill 5 is 4 gone 3 , the^ thrill 5 is 4 gone 4-3 a x way x
As we might expect, he repeats the melody for the second line. For the
third, he rises up to a climax on the blue seventh ("you know you done
me wrong") before returning to a variant of the falling-fifth motive as a
conclusion. Each stanza repeats this melody, but he renders each stanza,
and indeed each line, in a different way.
King's lyrics do not tell a linear story so much as circle around a simple
theme, namely the singer's mournfully telling his lover that the relationship,
and its magic, are over. His delivery almost never falls where one would
expect, but instead hinges on offbeats, the offbeats of offbeats, or in the
mysterious, ambiguous crevices between rhythmic pulses. The first phrase
of the first stanza, for example, if speaking were a guide, would be rendered
as "The thrill is gone" with emphases on the italicized words. King does
sing the phrase that way; but he counterbalances that emphasis, too, by
beginning the phrase after rather than on the downbeat, and then placing
"is" on the beat while the stronger syllables "thrill" and "gone" fall in the
cracks on either side (see Ex. 5.7). This placement is so subtle that we don't
even notice it unless we listen closely. It is typical of King's deep sense of
swing; but it also serves to bring out the special meaningfulness of each
word at this specific moment in the song. The same treatment is applied to
all the words of the stanza, which avoid emphasis on beats and never fall on
downbeats. Only at the very end, on "day," is there an unequivocal arrival
of a strong word squarely on a strong beat (although here, too, it is not the
downbeat, but the weaker third beat of the bar).
76 Graeme M. Boone
CHORDS
BEATS
LYRICS
lm
1
The thrill
2
is gone,
3
4
lm
1
2
3
the thrill
4
is gone
lm
1
a- way.
2
3
4
lm
1
2
3
4
IVm
1
The thrill
2
is gone
3
ba-
4
by,
IVm
1
2
3
the thrill
4
is gone
lm
1
away.
2
3
4
lm
1
2
3
4
b V |
1
You know you
2
done me
3
wrong
4
ba^
V
1
by,
2
3
and you'l
4
be
lm
1
sor-
2
ry some
3
day.
4
lm
1
2
3
4
5.7. Lyrics, rhythm, and chord progression in the first stanza of "The Thrill Is Gone."
King's guitar style in this song is also as remarkable for what it does not
do as for what it does. It engages, for example, in almost no call and response
with his voice (that is left, to some extent, to the backup guitar and piano).
Instead, he uses unhurried solos to frame the sung stanzas. These solos are in
his signature single-note style, making frequent use of bent notes and relying
extensively on the tonic, as well as the blue third and fifth above it (akin
to his vocal lines). They include a couple of recurring phrases, but he does
not build to any strong climax, nor does he emphasize some other form of
expressive development through the song. Like his singing, his guitar solos
help establish a mood, and then dwell in it. In the middle of his concluding
solo he rises to repeated notes on the high octave for a moment, after which
the solo very gradually melts away.
A string orchestra is added to the recording, in a popular style typical of
the era. It enters with the second stanza, in slow notes, then becomes more
active behind the following guitar solo with a slow violin melody. During the
third stanza the strings play low in their range; during the fourth, the cellos
become active and the violins rise to a higher level. The long concluding
guitar solo section is particularly atmospheric. The violins return to the slow
melody of the first solo for one chorus, then settle on a single chord that is
held for the rest of the solo while the cellos return to the melody they played
in the fourth stanza. There are no more chord changes from this point on:
the music simply floats forward to its fade-out ending.
77 Twelve key recordings
BEATS
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
RHYTHM
X
X
X
x
X
x
X
X
LYRICS
Oh,
high
on
de
moun-
tain
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
X
x
X
x
X
x
X
X
Well,
high
on
de
moun-
tain
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
X
X
X
x
X
x
X
X
Well,
high
on
de
moun-
tain
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
X
X
X
X
X
x
X
X
Jes
us
gon-
na make up
my dy-
in
bed.
5.8. Lyrics and rhythm in the first stanza of "Jesus goin' make up my dyin' bed."
"Jesus Goin' Make Up My Dyin' Bed"
Dock Reed, Vera Hall, and Jesse Allison, voice and body
percussion.
Recorded May 26, 1939 in Livingston, Alabama.
This traditional spiritual was recorded during a field trip by John Lomax.
The singers are not professional and the context is not church or stage, but
rather a private home. The only accompaniment is a regular percussive beat
that reinforces the consistent duple meter: though somewhat obscured by
the poor recording quality, it appears louder on f and 3, weaker on 2 and 4
(see Ex. 5.8). This suggests a "down," march-like bodily rhythm, opposite
to the "up," back-beat rhythm so basic to later gospel styles, but it is based
on the same swinging movement from side to side. The rhythm is straight,
not swung.
The three voices sing a straightforward and repetitive tune that, in each
line, begins on the beat but ends with a syncopated twist. Its four phrases
are cast in an a-b-a-c pattern common in old popular and folk music. The
a phrase here begins on the tonic and forms an arch shape, rising to the fifth
degree; the b phrase intensifies the same shape, beginning on the fifth and
rising to the octave before it too falls back down to the tonic. After the return
of a, phrase c makes a satisfying conclusion. It begins on the third, rises to
the fifth, and falls to the tonic - thus echoing the preceding arch shapes - but
then falls further, down to the low fifth, before resolving home. This four-
square stanza, divisible into two paired phrases or four individual phrases, is
very different from the threefold blues structure; and yet the song has similar
arch-shaped phrases and blue inflections. The melodic style is pentatonic,
too (although, as performed here, often quite high in the inflections of its
third, fourth, and seventh degrees). These qualities are common to a great
78 Graeme M. Boone
many spirituals, reflecting a tradition of improvisation and adaptation in
African American sacred song that is every bit as rich and elemental as that
of the blues, and intimately related to it. The somewhat tense timbre also
recalls that of blues singers, although the sustained vibrato adds a particular
sweetness that sometimes distinguishes sacred singing.
A contrasting tune, appearing at two points in the song, plays the role of a
verse in relation to the above refrain tune. Its melody is also in four phrases,
but is literally more "suspenseful" as all of them begin on and emphasize
the higher fifth degree; three of the four end on it as well, only the last one
coming to rest on the tonic. It thus expands on the upward intensification
that was already noted in the refrain stanza's b phrase.
The words are the expressive focus of this music, and their patterning
interlocks with that of the tune. The lyric form of the main stanza is a a a B:
the first three lines are identical within each stanza, while the fourth line,
identical among the stanzas, caps them with the song's focal theme. This
creates a kind of verse-refrain structure within the stanza, for example:
Oh, high on de mountain
Well, high on de mountain
Well, high on de mountain
Jesus gonna make up my dyin' bed.
Jesus, I been in de valley
Jesus, I been in de valley
Jesus, I been in de valley
Jesus gonna make up my dyin bed.
Powerful in this form is the threefold intensification of the a line, which is
given particular emphasis by the reinforce-and-return melody noted earlier.
The b line appears as a release from this pattern, as well as a refrain. Again,
we note a similarity to blues form; but the difference between three- and
fourfold structure is fundamental.
The words of the other, "verse" melody follow a pattern of a b c d,
showing no repetition of lines and no later recurrence. But a sense of poetic
resonance is gained through rhyme between the second and fourth lines,
for example:
When you see me dyin'
I don't want you to cry
All I want you to do for me
Is to close my dyin' eyes.
The song's message is characteristic of many antebellum spirituals, juxta-
posing in simple but evocative terms the terrible inevitability of death to
the saving grace of Jesus. There is no narrative unfolding to the progression
of ideas; instead, they suggest a simple but potent meditation on Christ's
79 Twelve key recordings
world- and life-embracing power, invoking mountains and valley, kneeling
in humility, and sleeping, all in relation to death. The almost constant repe-
tition and recurrence of lyrics is ideal for driving their meaning home; and it
also invites participation on any level, ranging from casual or improvisatory
to intensive and highly planned.
Our three performers give some idea of that participatory range. Dock
Reed leads the group, closely followed by Vera Hall and Jesse Allison. Often
the latter two do not come in on the first word(s) of a phrase or stanza.
This lends a call-and-response element to their interaction with Reed, and
suggests that they may be spontaneously picking up on some of the verses
he chooses to intone. All three sing the same melody, but with varying ap-
proaches to rhythm, melody, and intonation; the effect is heterophonic and
at times even fleetingly polyphonic. Such variable interplay between their
voices, immediately striking to the listener, has an inspired and beautiful
effect. As in much African American music it conveys the sense of a shared
musical community, in which each singer finds value in adding a distinct
and heartfelt voice to the group.
"Golden Gate Gospel Train"
The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet: Henry Owens, first tenor;
William Langford, second tenor; Willie Johnson, baritone;
Arlandus Wilson, bass.
Recorded August 4, 1937 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In essential ways "Golden Gate Gospel Train" is the opposite of the preceding
recording. Made by a group of young urban musicians well known from
their performances on radio, it is their own composition, recorded in order
to be sold, and closely reflects contemporary trends in popular music and
culture. Both songs are about redemption, but where the slower, meditative
spiritual projected solitude, submission, and stasis in the face of death, the
upbeat, extroverted "Gospel Train" projects opportunity, celebration, and
movement toward heaven, never mentioning the word "death" at all. This
quality exemplifies the jubilee, the leading form of African American popular
sacred song during the 1920s and 1930s. "Gospel Train" also conveys the hip
urbanity of other popular vocal music of the time, using jazzy sound effects
and a light, somewhat nonchalant tone. Its central metaphors emphasize
loud machinery and people going places, unlike those of "Jesus gonna make
me," which evoked quietude and timeless, immutable nature.
From its very first note "Gospel Train" throws the listener into move-
ment. The first words and keening whistle seem already in the middle of
something, and offbeat phrasing in the fragmentary opening stanza makes
it impossible at first even to be sure where the downbeat is. But soon we
80 Graeme M. Boone
CHORDS
[1
1
1
v +
BEATS
X
2
X
3
x 4]
X
1
X
2
X
3
x 4
X
LYRICS
Gos
pel
train
is
com
in'
You'd
RHYTHM-FILLER
Wa-
a-
a-
aw
ca
doo
ffoo
doo
goo
doo
goo-doo
goo-doo
RHYTHM-BASS
Wa-
a-
a-
aw
baw
baw
baw
baw
ba-baw
CHORDS
V
V +
V
V
BEATS
1
x
2
X
3
x 4
X
1
X
2
x
3
x 4
x
LYRICS
bet
ter
get
your
bus'
-ness
right.
You'd
RHYTHM— FILLER
goo-doo goo-doo
goo-doo
goo-doo
RHYTHM-BASS
baw
baw
baw
baw
la-baw
baw
oaw
baw
baw
ba-baw
CHORDS
I
1
V +
V +
1
1
V +
V +
BEATS
1
X
2
X
3
x 4
X
1
X
2
X
3
x 4
X
LYRICS
bet-
ter
your
house
in or
der
friends
You know
the
RHYTHM-FILLER
doo
goo
doo
goo
doo
goo-doo
goo-doo
doo
goo
doo
goo
doo
goo-doo
RHYTHM-BASS
baw
baw
baw
baw
ba-baw
baw
baw
baw
baw
ba-baw
CHORDS
1
1
V +
V +
V +
V +
BEATS
1
X
2
X
3
x 4
X
i
X
2
X
3
x 4
X
LYRICS
train's
gon
na
be
here
to-
night.
[Don't you
hear ...]
INTERJECTION
Lord!
RHYTHM-FILLER
train's
gon-
na
be
here
ro-
night
£fOO
doo
RHYTHM-BASS
baw
baw
baw
baw
ba-baw
baw
baw
baw
baw
ba-baw
5.9. Vocal rhythm, lyrics, and chord progression in the first full stanza of "Golden Gate Gospel Train"
orient ourselves in a steady duple meter with straight rhythm. As in other
earlier twentieth-century popular music, you can hear both a slower beat
(marked by the numbers in Ex. 5.9) and a faster one (whose additional beats
are marked by an x) ; a stimulating "backbeat" element is added by rhythmic
patterns and arrivals emphasizing the in-between beats. In keeping with the
strong train rhythm, Owens' lead tenor voice sticks close to the beat, but
he still spices it up with occasional syncopations: in Example 5.9 a softer
instance is shown on "bus'ness" and "be here," and a more hard-swinging
one on "order friends."
The formal outlines of the song conform to jazz-influenced popular mu-
sic of the time, with a series of four-line stanzas punctuated by improvisatory
solos.There is no separate refrain stanza but, as in the preceding spiritual, a
refrain line occurs at the end of every stanza. Telling of the momentous ar-
rival of the gospel train, the words exhort the listener to get ready for it, while
the singers evoke train sounds - bell, whistle, wheels turning - all with their
voices alone. Owens asks the listener: "Don't you hear the whistle blowin',
Hear the bells a-tolling, Don't you hear the engine exhaustin' friend?" point-
ing to its different sounds even though we clearly hear them already; in this
manner he underlines their doubly metaphorical nature. The real gospel
train is metaphysical too, but a leap of faith will be necessary to hear or see
it, and to climb on board. According to the refrain, "The train's gonna be
here tonight"; the song's train is a harbinger of the true gospel train.
The tonality of the song blends bluesy intonation (especially the wailing
third) seamlessly together with the fixed-note approach commonly used
in harmonic progressions. Such exquisite blending is possible because the
81 Twelve key recordings
voices in this a cappella performance adjust microtonally at all moments
to optimize either a wailing or fixed note, depending on what is needed.
It is also possible because the song is based on just one chord, the tonic
(home) major chord. As shown in Example 5.9, this chord does alternate
with another chord during the stanzas, but that other chord is an unstable
passing chord (augmented dominant, minus its third) that serves as a foil
to the tonic, to which it inevitably returns. Using a single "drone" chord as
harmonic anchor helps the song to focus on the train's rhythmic drive and
on the exhortation of its gospel message.
In addition to all this, there are four "instrumental" solos in the latter
part of the song - a nice touch, using voices to imitate mechanical sounds
and then, on top of that, imitating another "machine" that is actually a
musical instrument, whose plaintive sound imitates the human voice. That
muted-trumpet sound, together with the bluesy falling line it intones over
and over, recalls a tradition in jazz going back to Duke Ellington's jungle
music, which itself harked back to an imagined primal earthiness of African
American folk expression. Ellington's music was both playful and serious,
depending on what you heard in it; the quartet's can be too.
The instrumental-style solos are emphatically based on blues style, and
use its falling-fifth and arch shapes. The sung melody of the stanzas consists
of variations on a basic idea, beginning on the high octave (or sometimes
on the fifth), falling through blue seventh, fifth, and third, and coming to
rest either on the third (in the stanza's third line) or the tonic (in the first,
second, and fourth lines) . This shape is similar to blues phrasing and is based
on the same pentatonic framework, but the effect is distinctive due to the
crisp articulation of notes, syllables, and rhythm as well as the four-square
stanzaic form.
"Take My Hand, Precious Lord"
Comparison of three different versions, plus the original written
composition.
Within African American gospel traditions there is arguably no more famous
song than "Precious Lord," whose language, melody, and harmonies evoke
strength and profundity, as well as a simplicity that is adaptable to many
different styles. Recorded by solo singers in the "Watts style" of slow, free
rhythm as well as in medium and upbeat arrangements, it is a good can-
didate for comparing different interpretations. We shall begin with a close
look at the "blueprint" of the written composition, and then consider three
recordings.
"Precious Lord" was created by Thomas Dorsey in 1932, essentially by
adapting the poetry of a hymn by the earlier nineteenth-century composer
82 Graeme M. Boone
George N. Allen to the melody from another hymn by that same composer.
The lyrics proceed in a stream of mostly self-contained anapests and occa-
sional iambs, with emphasis on the last syllable in each cell (e.g., "Precious
Lord | take my hand | Lead me on | let me stand" or "When my way | grows
drear'). These create a gentle, undulating rhythm, organized into three
stanzas on the following model:
number of syllables rhyme
Precious Lord, take my hand six (or five) a
Lead me on, let me stand six (or five) a
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn. nine (or seven) b
Through the storm, through the night six c
Lead me on, to the light six c
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home, nine B
While the majority of lines have a binary structure ("Precious Lord | take
my hand"), every third one has a ternary structure ("I am tired 1 1 am weak |
I am worn"). This extension places additional weight on the line ending,
suggesting not only an important arrival but an emphatic pause that would
fill out the binary rhythm of the preceding lines ("I am tired, I am weak | I
am worn. "). This arrival is doubly heightened at the stanza endings,
since the last line is identical in all three stanzas, serving as a refrain: "Take
my hand, Precious Lord, lead me homer The word-reversal of this refrain
line in relation to the poem's opening line ("Precious Lord, take my hand")
creates a lovely sense of recall and earnestness, as do further recurrences of
"precious Lord" in later stanzas. The words address God directly, asking for
support and guidance amid the hardships and fears of life. The simplicity
of language (river, storm, night; hand, day, light) allows for a maximum of
emotive resonance. "Home" at the end of each stanza signifies heaven, and
also God's grace in the here and now; it is the culminating idea of the poem,
and a central topic of gospel lyrics.
The melody enhances the poem's formal and expressive qualities. Its
rhythm is set in a gently lilting \. Like the poetry, it follows a consistent
pattern (eighth note, eighth note, half note), moving quickly through the
weaker syllables to linger on the strong, and the pause on the end of the longer
lines is doubled in length. The tune falls into two closely related halves, each
containing three lines of poetry. The shorter (a) poetic lines that begin
each half are paired together to make a broader, gently arching melody
spanning four bars; the longer (b) lines that conclude each half are ex-
tended in their musical endings so that they too last for four bars. In this
way, the stanza's music is multiply articulated, being divisible into two halves,
four equal phrases, six phrases corresponding to individual poetic lines, or
83 Twelve key recordings
fourteen sub-phrases corresponding to individual poetic cells. The tune is
in a folk-like style, and remains the same for all stanzas; but it contains a
subtly dramatic element, for it begins quite low (on the third degree, six steps
below the tonic) and reaches a climax, in the fourth of its six phrases, nine
steps higher (on the fifth above the tonic). The melodic language is mostly
pentatonic, but it is in a major mode, and conforms to Protestant hymn
style and related folk traditions by preferring the second and sixth degrees
to the fourth and seventh. For the sake of discussion, we will call the re-
sulting framework (based on 1, 2, 3, 5, 6) a "major" pentatonic framework;
it contrasts sharply with the minor or "blues" framework (based on 1,3, 4,
5, 7) that has characterized almost all of the preceding songs in this chapter.
The harmonies of the setting are straightforward and strongly grounded;
most phrases begin on the tonic chord, and the underlying progression is
simple and almost entirely in the diatonic major (using I, IV, and V chords).
Overall, the song recalls numerous older melodies (e.g., "Amazing Grace"),
a kind of family relationship that we also noted among blues melodies. But
individual touches, some of which have been mentioned above, give the
song its own personality. Most of them stem from Allen himself; but im-
portant ones stem from Dorsey, too, notably the inspired combination of
melody and poetry, and a brief second rise to a high fifth degree near the
end. As one might expect, there is no hint of blues intonation in the written
composition; the only ornaments are occasional appoggiatura-like leaping
notes, occurring at the end of lines 1 and 3, and in the middle of line 4.
Mostly stemming from Allen, these do not imply any use of blue notes.
Five Soul Stirrers of Houston: Rebert H. Harris, first tenor; Ernest
R. Rundless, second tenor; Senior Roy Crain, utility vocal; Mozel
Franklin, baritone; and Jesse Farley, bass.
Recorded c. 1939 in Chicago or Los Angeles.
This was one of the very first recordings of the Soul Stirrers, who went onto
become a leading gospel quintet in the next two decades. Despite its poor
technical quality and surface noise we can already hear the classic sound of
this group, showing a soulful, hard edge and bluesy roughness that sharply
contrasts with the smooth, light touch of the Golden Gate Quartet and an-
nounces a new, more r&b-influenced era in gospel style. Using common
gospel technique, their arrangement begins with a slow, dramatic introduc-
tion. R. H. Harris intones the tune in stop/start rhythm, pausing at the end of
each three-syllable cell. The rhythm here is free, though it roughly approxi-
mates a very slow \ time, with each three-syllable cell filling a bar (two eighth
notes followed by one dotted half-note). His strong voice is supported by
block chords from the other singers, and the feeling is already urgent: the
faster syllables move quickly, the supporting harmonies are close and their
84 Graeme M. Boone
rhythms sharp, and all voices are sustained with intensity. Harris' melody is
fairly straightforward, but still brimming with blue twists and turns, lean-
ing especially on the tonic and the blue third. This quality increases when,
after this introduction, the tempo shifts to a medium-upbeat pace in \ time
and the supporting voices slip into a highly repetitive vamping style, using
a "clanka-lank"-type rhythm to spice up the chord progression; their words
are not easily discernible, but seem mostly based on "lead-a-me." Over that
support Harris improvises an utterly bluesy interpretation of the song, be-
ginning again with the first stanza, proceeding through the three stanzas,
and then concluding with a reprise of stanza 1. Like Dock Reed's singers
but with more urgency, Harris juxtaposes onbeat and offbeat rhythms,
often ending his phrases with a syncopated twist; Dorsey's melody, though
discernible, is swallowed up in his sustained outburst of musical testimony.
Excepting the half-cadence arrival on the second degree midway through
each stanza, his singing is marked by insistence on the tonic degree, to which
almost every melodic idea (short or long) returns. Around that note of con-
viction he spins out a passionate string of formulas that adapt the tune to
the blues-type pentatonic framework, with the addition of the second scale
degree as needed to fill out the melody. Most commonly he rises to the blue
third; often, expending more energy, he rises to the blue fifth. He rarely goes
higher than that until the last chorus, where, in a subtle climax, he fleetingly
hits a high seventh three times, opening up a maximum of vocal range. A
more aggressive climax occurs earlier, however, in preparation for the third
stanza: here he simply lets go with a passionate "well" on the fifth that seems
to go on forever (it lasts for about six seconds).
Clara Ward, voice; with Herbert Francis, organ.
Recorded c. 1952, possibly in Philadelphia.
Clara Ward was admired for her musical and expressive style in slow songs,
and this recording of "Precious Lord" provides a classic example. Unlike the
Soul Stirrers' arrangement, hers is in a non-metrical style reminiscent of
old-time hymn singing. The pace of the music is very slow; in her two-and-
a-half- minute performance, she includes only the first stanza and the second
half of the last one. Having no beat or meter, its rhythms are governed by her
majestic sense of flow, which gives a distinct shape to each separate phrase.
An electric, church-style organ alone provides accompaniment: it follows
her closely, supporting her performance with swells and occasional inter-
polated harmonies. Ward's strong voice builds on the tune, but differently
from Harris: the basic three-syllable rhythmic cell is her primary phrasing
unit, and she renders it in a constantly shifting way. Often both the first and
last syllable are extended, in a broad oratorical gesture (long-short-longest:
"Precious Lord, take my hand"). It is chiefly on the longer syllables that she
adds embellishments or "curlicues," with turns, rises, and elaborate falling
85 Twelve key recordings
motives that display a more agile voice than Harris'; some recur over and
over, giving a unique signature to her style. Her ornaments draw mostly
on the major-type pentatonic framework of Dorsey's song, but they also
color it with an unabashedly blue-inflected approach. Particularly striking
is her frequent descent to the sixth degree of the scale, below the tonic,
as the lowest or ending note of her rapid formulas (e.g., "Lead me on"),
a note she tends to intone a bit sharp. Above all, Ward shows keen sense
of drama in the song, enhancing the rise and fall of its melody with vari-
ous kinds of intensification, pause, and development. Like Harris, she uses
higher notes for increased passion, and she reaches a culminating high oc-
tave at two different moments, both times around the climactic point of
Dorsey's melody (e.g., "through the storm"). The second time, she prolongs
the high moment a great deal by interjecting extra words on that note ( "Hear
my cry, God! Ah, hear my call, Yes, hold my hand"), before gradually settling
down to conclude; such heartfelt improvisation gives her performance the
effect of beauty, deep emotion, and the conviction of truth. Curiously, blue
sevenths occur in these high climax phrases, in both stanzas; and in the sec-
ond stanza, the outburst of falling ornaments at this point actually triggers
a shift over to the blues-type pentatonic language for a few seconds, which
returns to the major-type only for the final phrase of the song.
Mahalia Jackson, voice; with Mildred Falls, piano; Ralph Jones, organ.
Recorded March 27, 1956 in New York City.
Mahalia Jackson, often called the queen of gospel singers, worked with
Dorsey in the 1930s and 1940s when she was known for a passionate singing
style; but she made this recording during her Columbia recording years,
when her singing style was toned down and "polished" for a broad listening
public. She is accompanied by the remarkable Mildred Falls on piano, as
well as Ralph Jones on a muted organ part: the organ lays down a sustained
but quiet harmonic foundation, while the piano embellishes Jackson's per-
formance with arpeggios and other harmonic commentary that is just quiet
and smooth enough not to get in the way of her voice. The technical quality
of the engineering is high on the recording, especially by comparison with
the preceding ones: it captures the full sound of the instruments, while fore-
grounding the richness and depth of Jackson's voice. Her basic approach,
like Ward's, is slow and a-metric, and she uses the same rhythmic technique
based on the three-syllable cell, drawing out and ornamenting the longer
syllables at will; but her performance is more contained and introspective,
and even slower in pace. The sheer power, beauty, and range of her vocal
sound is breathtaking. It is marked by a distinct grainy quality, not unlike
that of a blues singer, but also tempered here by a vibrato and intonation
not far from classical music. At some moments her head voice dominates,
light and sweet, at others it's her chest voice, belted and growling like a
86 Graeme M. Boone
blues shouter; sometimes she sings with a piercing nasal projection and
sometimes from the throat, with a covered, rounded sound.
She adopts the underlying major- type pentatonic framework of Dorsey's
melody, as Ward did, but adds far fewer ornamental and bluesy touches.
Not once does she strike a blue fifth (although once she does hit a fifth a
bit low, on "precious Lord" at the end of the first stanza); and she hits blue
sevenths at just two points in the song, in identical descending ornaments
following the climactic "through the storm" phrases of the second half of
each stanza - the same place Ward did, though without going so far as to shift
to blues-type pentatonicism. Jackson's major thirds, sometimes approached
by upward scoops, follow the written melody; they resonate richly with the
supporting harmonies, and enhance upward melodic motion, often (though
not always) occurring in rising phrases (e.g., stanza 1: "Precious Lord,"
"I am worn," "Through the storm"). Her blue thirds, commonly intoned
with scooping or wavering, tend to intensify the expression and the forward,
downward melodic motion; they are usually found in descending lines (e.g.,
stanza 1: "Lead me on" "7am tired," "Lead me on"). We hear something of
this distinction in Ward's style, but Jackson makes much more out of it,
combining a hotter blues approach and a sweeter, "straight" style of singing
without sacrificing either. She arrives at a kind of hybrid - a classical gospel
style, one might say - in which both idioms find their place. With her
extraordinary voice, background, and musical sensibility, Jackson could
make such an accommodation sound natural and deeply meaningful.
"Oh Happy Day"
The Edwin Hawkins Singers.
Recorded 1968 in Berkeley, California.
As far as the general public is concerned, there may be no more familiar
recording in gospel music history than "Oh Happy Day." Featuring the
commanding solo voice of Dorothy Morrison, the power and excitement
of a full gospel choir, and the rich styling of soul music, it sold over seven
million records and helped to launch the "contemporary" sound that has
dominated gospel music since that time. Expressing the joy of being saved
by Jesus, its lyrics are highly repetitive: the refrain stanza, itself containing
seven statements of the title line "Oh happy day" and six of the line "When
Jesus washed," is sung four times through, and the single-verse stanza, in
which each line is repeated, is sung twice. This repetition actually works
to the song's advantage, thanks to the glorious sound of the choir and
soloist, the reassuring, uplifting message, and the soulful style, itself built
on repetition.
87 Twelve key recordings
The music begins with an instrumental introduction featuring the
backup band of piano, bass, drums, and conga, intoning the chords of the
second half of the main stanza. With their Latin-tinged syncopated rhythms,
vamp-like pattern, and relaxed tempo, the instruments are already steeped in
a soul idiom; their harmonic language is straightforward, and almost always
proceeds in simple repeated pairs of chords. Over this support the soloist
and choir alternate in call-and-response fashion throughout the song, with
the call usually falling on one chord and the response on another, forming
two layered melodies. These are diatonic, with no chromatic inflection and,
in the choral parts, relatively little blue intonation either. The refrain stanza
has an a-b-a form, with two "Oh happy day" sections (on I and IV chords)
framing a "When Jesus washed my sins away" section (on Urn and V).
Morrison's solo melody follows a broad but low arch form in the refrain,
its first line rising from the low tonic to the third degree ("Oh happy day"),
its second line falling from third back to tonic, with a flourish ("when He
washed"), and its third line settling more firmly on the tonic ("He washed
my sins away"). The choral responses, meanwhile, interweave their own
simple pattern of chords whose melody (i.e., soprano) line is always higher
than Morrison's, alternating first between the fifth and sixth degrees, then
between the sixth and seventh - never making it as far as the octave - and
finally returning to fifth and sixth. Overall, the pattern in this refrain is one
of relaxed motion back and forth, with some intensification in the middle
section. That motion blends with the bodily rhythm of the gospel chorus as
it swings from side to side.
The verse stanza shows a marked increase in excitement: both chorus
and solo are louder and more passionate, and their melodies begin and stay
in a higher register, rising well above the octave; the chorus finishes some
phrases with a shouted high note. In a deft touch Hawkins reverses their
roles here, the chorus first setting forth the lyric ("He taught me how . . .")
and Morrison responding with her own melodic commentary. The chord
changes move only half as fast in this stanza, abandoning the back-and-forth
motion of the refrain, and the characteristic syncopated refrain rhythm is
likewise smoothed out. The formal structure of this stanza is a a', with longer
musical phrases repeated to two rhyming poetic lines ("He taught me how
to walk right and pray / And in rejoicing every day").
The song as a whole is made up of these two stanzas, repeated in
the following order: refrain, refrain, verse, refrain, verse, and an extended
concluding section based on the refrain. Rejecting the contemporary fade-
out technique for ending the song, the group begins this conclusion with
a long and exciting vamp, featuring classic gospel backbeat clapping by the
chorus, jubilant alternation of choral refrain and Morrison's improvised
interjections, and the soul-inspired accompaniment with its seventh chords
88 Graeme M. Boone
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
CHORUS
X
Oh
4
X
hap
1
py
X
day
2
Oh
X
3
hap-
X
py
4
X
day
1 V
1
X
2
X
3
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
X
Oh
4
X
hap
1
py
X
day
2
X
3
X
4
X
VI7
1
X
2
X
3
CHORUS
Oh
hap-
py
day
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
CHORUS
X
When
4
Je
X
sus
Mm
1
X
washed
2
X
3
When
X
Je
4
sus
X
washed
V
1
X
2
X
3
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
CHORUS
X
Oh
4
X
Mm
1
X
when
2 x
He washed
3
When
X
Je
4
sus
X
washed
V
1
X
2
X
3
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
X
When
4
Je-
X
sus
Mm
1
X
washed
2
X
3
X
4
X
V
1
X
He
2
washed
X
my
3
sins
CHORUS
When
Je
sus
washed
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
CHORUS
X
4
a-
X
way,
1
X
2
Oh
X
Lord.
3
hap
X
py
4
X
day
IV
1
X
2
X
Ah,
3
CHORDS
BEATS
SOLO
CHORUS
X
4
X
1
hap-
X
py
2
day
Oh
X
3
hap-
X
py
4
X
c/ay
IV
1
X
2
X
3
5.10. Chorus and solo lyrics, rhythm, and chord progression in the refrain stanza of "Oh Happy Day," as
recorded in 1968 by the Edwin Hawkins Singers with Dorothy Morrison.
and relaxed instrumental embellishment. The music then subsides to a
relatively quiet ending, via a restatement of the refrain stanza.
"Oh Happy Day" remains compelling from beginning to end thanks to
its catchy rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns, the extra excitement
of its verse and conclusion, the fine singing of its choir, and perhaps above all
the stunning solo voice of Dorothy Morrison. Her lines are always rather
brief, alternating as they do with the choral lines, but they are marked by
rich, sometimes rough tone, a full and consistent vibrato, a remarkably
wide vocal range, a fine sense of swing, and a power that easily matches
the chorus at full tilt. Her rhythmic sensibility is illustrated in the initial
refrain stanza (shown in Ex. 5.10), where she consistently syncopates the
downbeat, attacking no strong syllable on it until the very last line ("happy
day"); this is an approach close to the one we noted in B. B. King's singing.
Also central to her style are added ornamental figures, improvised for the
most part in a major-type pentatonic scale, with falling motives related to
Clara Ward's though with less intense blue inflections. Most importantly,
she sings her curlicues with flair, conviction, and musicality; in a lesser
voice they might have sounded vain or superficial, but in hers they sound
appropriate and entirely convincing.
1 Mahalia Jackson
3 Bessie Smith, Late 1920s
4 Muddy Waters
5 Golden Gate Quartet
6 John Lee Hooker
7 Aretha Franklin
8 Rev. Gary Davis at Keele Folk Festival 1966
"Black twice": performance conditions for blues
and gospel artists
STEVE TRACY
The Blues started from slavery. Memphis slim
Why was I born in Mississippi when it's so hard to get ahead?
Every Black child born in Mississippi, you know the poor child was born dead.
J. B. LENOIR
Any discussion that purports to examine the social, cultural, political, and
economic conditions under which blues and gospel performers have had
to operate must take as its own genesis the dawn of the North Atlantic slave
trade, surely one of the bleakest sunrises in human history. Nearly 250 years
of the enforced system of legal chattel slavery in North America established
a network of laws, attitudes, and strategies, imposed with a frequently vigor-
ous and hateful, sometimes paternalistic and condescending, or misguided
benevolent force that contributed to shaping the physical, spiritual, psy-
chological, social, and cultural lives of the enslaved and their descendants.
Reconstruction brought hope, post-Reconstruction disappointment, and
the Jim Crow-era dismay and anger as a result of the unfulfilled promises
of one of humanity's most promising systems. "I got the backwoods blues,"
sang Rosa Henderson in 1924, "but I don't want to go back home," the
indignities of the Jim Crow cars 1 and southern mistreatment overwhelming
her desire to visit her childhood abode. Cow Cow Davenport expressed
the sentiment, too - "I'm tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim
Crow town" - but he left room open at the end of his song to sing about
coming back if the North did not fulfill its promise - an all-too-common
occurrence.
Most blues and many gospel performers, after all, have been African
Americans, the descendants of slaves, and heirs to this racism and discrimi-
nation in their myriad forms, from the far greater likelihood of existing be-
low the poverty level, to discrimination in housing, employment and edu-
cation, to discriminatory attitudes that associate the "race" with intellectual
inferiority and intensified appetitive passions, to the subtle and not-so-
subtle internalization of such attitudes to create at times a self-hatred or self-
destructiveness. Racism and paternalism - northern and southern, liberal
and conservative, radical and reactionary - frequently resulted in the ob-
jectification of African Americans as primitive, exotic, ignorant, violent,
90 Steve Tracy
sexualized, degraded non-humans, forming a network of attitudes and val-
ues that protracted the brutalizing environment under which slaves labored
in the peculiar institution. When African American singers sang of being
poor and a long way from home or motherless children, they delivered a
message that was a culmination of these various pressures and prohibitions
shaped into the optimistic art of the creator. Optimistic because it was im-
plicitly or explicitly a defiance of defeat through the acts of creating and
performing themselves; optimistic in its assertion of voice and humanity
in a world that restricted or denied them both; optimistic in its utilization
of a syncretistic African American style that would eventually transform
American culture; optimistic in the ultimate philosophical assertion that
"the sun is gonna shine in my back door some day."
Rural blues singers, whether playing on porch, at a house party or coun-
try supper, in the juke joint, on the street corner, on the circuit with a
medicine or stage show, carried this with them. Urban blues singers, on the
streets, in neighborhood clubs, on the road, in larger theatres, carried this
with them. Performers both rural and urban "adopted" by Leftist political
organizations who put them in the Cafe Society or From Spirituals to Swing
or political rallies or in "folk" gatherings, or "rediscovered" and marketed
to coffee houses, colleges, and international and domestic folk, jazz, and
blues festivals, carried this with them. And they all carried this with them
as entertainers whose aesthetics, demeanors and recordings were shaped
in part by these attitudes. Black, frequently poor, sometimes illiterate, of-
ten self-taught or informally trained rather than conservatory graduates,
they suffered the prejudiced standards of elitist social and cultural arbiters
with a hardihood that bespoke their faith in themselves, their talent, their
tradition, and/or their God as they persevered in creating a body of work
that was its own most effective response to a warped hegemonic imposition
of values. The difficulties for black performers were such that B. B. King
often asserted, "if you was a black person singing the blues, you black twice"
(Kostelanetz 1997: 174).
If we believed Blind Willie McTell's response to John Lomax's queries
about the mistreatment of African Americans in the South in 1940 - "They
haven't much trouble, the people, nowadays . . . Cause the white peoples
mighty good to the Southern people, as far as I know" (McTell 1940) - we
might think that social conditions had been greatly ameliorated less than
halfway through the twentieth century. However, as Lomax presses McTell,
it becomes clear that McTell is uneasy with Lomax's probing, unwilling
to discuss the situation honestly with a white man - a situation that likely
contributed to self-censorship in a variety of performance situations, though
not always. A year later, Son House recorded "County Farm Blues" for
91 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
John's son Alan, describing with certitude the fate of a black man who
did "anything that's wrong" in the South: a sentence to the county farm,
where the bossman Captain Jack would "write his name up and down your
back." Neither was this mistreatment limited to the South: Rosa Henderson
bemoaned the demeanor of Chicago policemen, who "can't police at all"
and "send you 'way for absolutely nothing at all." Other songs such as Blind
Blake's "Third Degree Blues" make clear this constant threat of violence
and incarceration under which blacks (performers included) existed. The
connection in Blake's recording is made explicitly to the slave past:
But they put me in jail, didn't give me no bond.
It made me think about my people's that's dead and gone.
Obviously the problems faced by African Americans in hometowns, where
they might be better known to the local authorities, would be present,
even amplified, in unfamiliar settings, where charges of vagrancy might be
applied to a likely worker who could be pressed into cheap labor by local
enforcement officials.
Such a long history of enforced labor sometimes provoked a weariness
that was vented with bitter humor: "I wouldn't tell a mule to get up, Lawd,
if he set down in my lap," Big Bill Broonzy exclaimed in "Plow Hand Blues,"
lamenting a controlling system that treated him more like an animal than
a man. It prompted him to attempt to break the cycle of discrimination by
rejecting his rural enslavement: "Now I declare I'm through with plowin',
that's what killed my old grandpap." But how to escape sweating back of a
mule's behind from sunup to sundown? A number of people were drawn to
the options of becoming a preacher or a musician, or both. As Son House
sang in 1930, "I'm gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won't have to
work." But just because they were no longer snuffing up mule manure did
not mean the air was clear - or the water tasted like wine - for performers
in their chosen professions. The lives of blues and gospel performers were
still fraught with specific professional dangers and indignities peculiar to
the lives of African American performers.
"When I first started to hoboin', I took the highway to be my friend,"
sang many an itinerant blues and gospel performer about the optimistic
beginning to their r amblings. Whether they were walking or riding their
thumbs, or braving the more dangerous route of riding the "blinds" or the
rods of a train, where the dangers of exposure to the elements, loss of limb -
as in the case of Furry Lewis - and falling to their deaths were ever present,
they were exercising their post-Civil War right to increased geographical
liberation in large numbers. Unfortunately, the road can be a very fickle
friend to the traveling musician, and many a blues and gospel singer has
92 Steve Tracy
lamented the rigors of the road, from transportation to accommodations to
law enforcement to club conditions and crowded itineraries. In the words
of John Cephas:
But I think it takes a certain kind of person to handle the aggravation of
being on the road so much. Its definitely a strain. I mean, we've been on
the road so long that I keep a bag packed all the time. When I come home,
I just take out all the dirty clothes and put in some other clothes and set
my bag by the door People don't really realize how much work goes
into being a musician. They just see you on stage and naturally they think
that playing music is easy for you. And usually it is, onstage. But they
don't know how far you've driven to get there or how far you have to
drive after you leave or that you have to play some more gigs the next day.
(Pearson 1990: 185)
In the post-war era, most professional blues and gospel groups used
"a large automobile or touring limousine [as] the usual mode of transporta-
tion," as Kip Lornell points out concerning sacred vocal harmony quartets
in Memphis (1995: 87). Booking agencies did not always supply the most
comfortable or reliable transportation, as H-Bomb Ferguson, traveling in a
rented station wagon with B. B. King, lamented:
All of a sudden we saw smoke coming from under the hood. And I can't
drive, it looks like 4 in the morning. . . . Next thing I knew the motor was
on fire. And we saw it, and I shook B. He was in on the seat sleeping.
I say, "B., the wagon's on fire, let's go." We jumped out and got out - it
burned up. (Ferguson 1984)
In fact, the travel itineraries were frequently so packed that the transporta-
tion was literally run into the ground, and The Spirit of Memphis Group
traveled "at least half a million miles in one decade," so much that "no
group member can recall the number or model of cars they used" (Lornell
1995: 87). Group member Jethro Bledsoe's travel itinerary for April 1952 lists
seventeen appearances in nine states between April 3 and April 27, includ-
ing appearances in Newark and Philadelphia on the same day (Lornell 1995:
203). While some groups, such as B. B. King's at the apex of his popularity,
sometimes toured in a bus, the hard grind of driving all day and playing all
night must have been grueling, particularly when it was sometimes a group
member who had signed on to drive. Still, Horace Boyer points out that
automobile travel was viewed as preferable, since "riding buses or trains
meant having to travel in the 'colored' section" (Boyer 1995: 55). When
blues performers sang "I'm gonna build me a railroad of my own," it was in
part in response to these intolerable situations and lack of control and power
over them that prompted their vow, just as the religious singer's gospel train
bound for glory indicated a desire for a decent ride as well.
93 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
Rampant discrimination added to the pressures of the road. H-Bomb
Ferguson described his experiences on his first tour of one-nighters in the
1950s:
Macon, Georgia, North Carolina, Wheeling, West Virginia, the
restrooms and the restaurants - BACK DOOR. We did. We even play a
dance - most of it be in a barn, big old barn. The band would play,
when you get through, you get something to eat, you go to the back, you
get a sandwich to go. They had the "colored" and the "white" signs. And
you couldn't come in the front door. But here's what really got me: the
dance would be mixed, but you couldn't go over there and eat with them.
They would go to the front, I had to go around the back and get
ours. . . . We would get the sandwiches, jump in the wagon, and eat it on
the way. And you had your little problems. A lot of times that we played
in the Deep South, the sheriff would escort you out of town. Make sure
you leave. The dance was over at 1, "You guys gonna get something to
eat before you go?" We say, "Yes sir." He say, "Well I'm gonna take you to
the restaurant. You go in the back door and get your food, and you hit
the road. I'm gonna put you on the road." And they would. They would
take you right on the highway and tell you, "Take so and so and get out
of here." You figure everybody's enjoying theyself, why would they do
that? See, I went along with everybody else. Otherwise, you might not be
here today. (Ferguson 1984)
That threat of violence, and the hostility of law enforcement officers who
anticipated the molestation of white women - "I don't want you hanging
around here. You might fool with some of these white women," one Alabama
sheriff said to Ferguson - was what prompted B. B. King to carry Winchester
rifles with him on his bus on later tours (King 1996: 179).
Ferguson also described the extremely low pay for performances -
"about 10-12 bucks for the whole show" - and poor diet and living accom-
modations:
We wasn't making much money, so we would go in and check in a hotel
together. And he said, "Hey H., how much you got?" I said, "I got about
7 bucks." He said, "We get a room together." So we would tell the lady,
"We just want a room with a single bed, you know, full-size bed." He
sleep at the foot, I sleep at the head. We eat sardines and crackers, get
a pop. It was bad. (Ferguson 1984)
Not only that but, as Tony Heilbut reports, such simple tasks as laundry
could become difficult to impossible to accomplish on the road: the Dixie
Hummingbirds acknowledged, "when a shirt got dirty, they'd wear it inside
out" (Heilbut 1971: 76). For all the deprivation and low pay, the group
continued the tour, for as B. B. said, "You have to learn to crawl before
you can walk. I know they're robbing me. We ain't making much money.
94 Steve Tracy
But we getting a little publicity out of it" (Ferguson 1984). That publicity,
along with the pride of the performing artist intent on providing the best
presentation of his talent and professionalism, made many a show far better
than conditions would allow it to be.
For female artists the difficulties could sometimes be magnified. Rhythm
and blues star Ruth Brown recalled "[d]ressing in sheds and outhouses by
candlelight," narrowly avoiding a riot when she "tried to hang her gowns in
a dressing room on the white level," and "red paint on the seats and flour in
the gas tank" in Macon, Georgia. One would expect that encountering such
hostility, suffering "Hey, bitch, what are you doing in this neighborhood"
as part of the rocks and gravel of Jim Crow travel, would exact a heavy
emotional price, and Brown acknowledges the "hurt in her soul" from such
mistreatment (Goode 1969). B. B. King recognizes its effects as well: "After
you have lived in the [Jim Crow] system for so long, then it don't bother you
openly, but way back in your mind it bugs you" (Haralambos 1970: 374).
But just as surely, H-Bomb Ferguson stated matter of factly and proudly,
he would not allow it to have any effect on his performance. In response
to the low pay and high prices - financial and emotional - he offered,
"We split it, but nobody know. We come on the stage, you think them guys
are millionaires! Half the time they be hungry as hell. We keep singing. We
did that for about two years" (Ferguson 1984).
Long trips and low pay, of course, fostered conditions where marital
fidelity could be severely tested. When Sonny Boy Williamson sang "I don't
believe you really really love me, I think you just like the way my music
sound," he was acknowledging the difficulties of performers beset by prob-
lems with groupies as well as doubts about their own value separate from
their performing status. Sometimes there were practical professional ad-
vantages to illicit relationships, as Heilbut reports concerning the travels of
some male gospel singers, and disadvantages for females:
[T] here's a hard, practical reason for the promiscuity. The quartet
singers need their women to help pay their hotel bills, cook for them,
and treat them nice. Since most are family men, the eighty or ninety
dollars they clean up on the road would make them candidates for
welfare if gospel groupies didn't come to their rescue. Things are less
easy for female gospel singers - the sexual double standard brands her a
"whore" if she entertains protectors . . . (1971: 287)
B. B. King dedicated his autobiography Blues All Around Me to his fifteen
children, many of them born in the 1950s to different mothers, admitting
that he was an absentee father who found various women who comforted
him: "These were women who understood me, women I tried to under-
stand, and women I wanted to love. ... I didn't think of the consequences of
95 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
having children" (1996: 156). He regrets missing out on parts of their lives,
but not pursuing his dream of making music, and takes pride in remaining
in touch and supporting his children in the ways that he can. Twice married,
he was also twice divorced, his marriages victims of separation produced
by the rigors of travel. The loneliness that young women faced on the
road was bemoaned by gospel singer Willa Ward-Royster, sister of Clara
Ward: because Clara's mother "had imposed upon her an abstinence and
loneliness that was intolerable," Clara dealt with her separation from men
by dabbling "in homosexual activities," which prompted vehement mini-
sermons from her mother when the activities came to light (Ward-Royster
1997: 68-9). Whether or not this homosexual activity resulted from Clara's
enforced isolation from men or was an already present proclivity, surely it
was exacerbated by a frequently hectic and demanding schedule.
Of course, there was also sometimes a burden for the African American
performer with regard to the image it was necessary to project in public
and on the stage. After all, in American society, high profile blacks were
frequently held up as representatives of their race by whites, and expected to
uphold the image of the "race" by black leaders. This responsibility was one
often taken very seriously by musicians intent on projecting a sophisticated
and responsible image, for both personal and racial reasons. Mahalia
Jackson, for example, was told by a voice professor, "Young woman, you've
got to stop that hollering. That's no way to develop a voice, and its no credit
to the Negro race" (Boyer 1995: 88). Leaving the South for a broader touring
schedule, southern quartets "presented themselves not only as upstanding
and talented members of the community, but as a group of African American
men who could and did serve as role models for other African American
men" (Boyer 1995:93). The Fairfield Four, for example, maintained strict by-
laws in the 1940s specifying the number and times of business and rehearsal
meetings, and rules for punctuality, speaking in public, drinking, accepting
drinks from strangers, chewing gum in church, cursing, and showing
up for broadcasts, with established fines for each infraction (Boyer 1995:
148-9). Rckb saxophonist Earl Bostic was described as "always a gentle-
man... he stayed in his tux" (Tracy 1993: 133), and trumpeter Aaron
Izenhall recounted restrictions in Louis Jordan's band:
Louis couldn't stand any monkey business or sloppy playing, and if
anyone smoked pot or took drugs they were fired on the spot. . . .
Everyone had to behave like gentlemen, be clean, be smart and behave
themselves. . . . But you couldn't fool him; if you'd been up all night at a
party or had too much to drink, he'd know it. (Chilton 1992: 116)
While not all blues bands worked under such highly formal rules, especially
if they played in smaller clubs or juke joints, some band leaders like Albert
96 Steve Tracy
Washington maintained a sartorially impeccable personal standard no mat-
ter where he played in public. For him, it made both the music and the
musicians special, setting them apart from some ratty old amateur playing
around rather than playing.
The performance venues, of course, differed in size, acoustics, and social
milieu, each presenting distinct advantages and disadvantages with regard
to the musician's experience. On famed Beale Street, the scene was virtually
bursting with activity:
the Monarch, the Midway, Pee Wee's Saloon, and the Hole in the Wall;
the Palace and Daisy theaters; the One-Minute Cafe, the riverfront area
at the foot of Beale with its carnival-like allure, its hucksters peddling
fried fish, watermelon, and other fresh fruit, its hognose restaurants
offering barbecue, pigs' feet, and, yes, chitlins, the tantalizing odors
attracting the riverboat roustabouts sweating and swearing as they
wrestled with crates . . . (McKee 1981: 8)
But all that neighborhood energy, which helped generate the visceral power
of the blues, could also generate a level of violence and hostility that was
dangerous for musicians and patrons alike:
I was always afraid of that Hole in the Ground There's some old
ladies was there, they was bad, they was just mean. They're old grown
women but I was a young fellow. One of them called me. "Come here,
Red," she say. Say, "You like me?" I say, "Yeah, I like everybody." Half
scared. And she just taken her teeth and got a good mouthful of my
forehead and she just worked, she just bit, just left a bad place where she
just taken her teeth and just worked it up in there. (McKee 1981: 138)
Big Bill Broonzy recalled the honky tonks in Charley Loran's camps, where
men too short to reach the craps tables would "[p]ull that dead man up
there, and stand on him and still keep shooting dice, see" (Lomax 1993: 464) .
Muddy Waters carried a gun for his own protection at the Club Zanzibar in
Chicago (Tooze 1997: 89), and pianist Lonnie Bennet recalled nearly having
his fingers shot off at the Vet's Inn in Cincinnati. In virtually every city,
one could find a club officially named or unofficially nicknamed "Bucket of
Blood," acknowledging, sometimes in an almost celebratory fashion glori-
fying the "outlaw" in a hypocritical environment, the violence found within
the dim confines of the establishment. Of course, the club environment was
not always unremittingly violent: blues performers frequently describe with
great joy their performance experiences with patrons and other musicians,
but that constant threat of violence was a situation with which musicians
had to live, along with the possibility of being cheated with regard to door
receipts, rate of pay, and drink charges.
97 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
Such clubs might frequently be without adequate ventilation or safety
exits or equipment, making them hazardous for both musicians and patrons.
One celebrated fire in Natchez, Mississippi, sparked blues recordings by
Gene Gilmore, Baby Doo Caston, and Howlin' Wolf, describing the 1940
tragedy precipitated by a management decision to barricade the windows
to prevent non-paying customers from getting a free look at and listen to
Walter Barnes' band:
Lord and the peoples all was dancin', enjoyin' their lives so hard,
Just in a short while, the dance hall was full of fire. (Caston 1974)
A fire resulting from a brawl in a Twist, Arkansas, club almost burned up
B. B. King and his guitar, which he promptly named "Lucille," after the
woman who precipitated the blaze. Clearly, where economic motivations
rule, aesthetic and human considerations are among the early casualties.
Nevertheless, once artists made it to the stage in whatever venue, they
frequently described a sense of strength, control, and fulfillment as they
were finally able to do what they had put up with all of these various
impediments for: perform. Some entertainers, for example, were not above
"clowning" for their audiences, while others adopted what they considered
to be a more "dignified" performance demeanor: "[R. H.] Harris refused
to 'clown,' to leap off stage or run down aisles," preferring to "sing the
folks happy" (Heilbut 1971: 116). Sterling Brown's poem "Ma Rainey"
explores Rainey 's symbiotic relationship with her audience, describing
how her connection to "the people" and the folk roots informs her artistry,
attitude, and subject matter, allowing her to help sustain those who have
inspired her to her heights of musical greatness. As early as the 1920s such
commentators spoke of the performances of blues singers as "strange rites"
and of singers such as Bessie Smith as "priestesses" and "conjure women"
(Van Vechten 1926: 67). If such descriptions were obviously influenced
by the exoticization of the African American, they clearly also reflected a
realization that the performances of blues and religious music were clearly
more than mere entertainments, though highly entertaining they were.
The performance of blues and gospel music, in fact, have been compared
by a number of commentators, Charles Keil, James Cone, Paul Garon,
and Jon Michael Spencer among them, who find similarities in style and
function.
To some, such a discussion of the theological and religious ramifications
of the blues seems anathema, since there are those in the Christian religious
community who see the blues as the "Devil's music" and hence having noth-
ing to do with religion as they know it. Clearly the origins, conditions and
situations in performance venues, and frequently frank and earthy language
98 Steve Tracy
and philosophy of the blues, have a great deal to do with this image. Still,
we encounter in the history of the blues a variety of performers - Charley
Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell, Rosetta Tharpe, Wynona Carr,
and B. B. King among them - who have included blues, spirituals, and gospel
music in their repertoires, though frequently discreetly and with particular
audiences in mind. At times Son House would refuse to play the blues on
Sundays, and Sam Cooke suffered embarrassing rejection when he tried to
return to his religious audience once he had recorded the blues:
While the Soul Stirrers were on stage, they called Sam up. . . . Somehow
when Sam hit the stage, the crowd went dead and stayed dead till Jimmy
Outler and Paul Foster came back. Folks were hollering, "Get that blues
singer down. Get that no good so-and-so down. This is a Christian
program." (Heilbut 1971: 121)
While there were those who maintained, even insisted upon, the sepa-
ration of sacred and secular music, there is no denying that the symbolic
functions of the musics can accomplish similar climaxes and ends, connect-
ing Ira Tucker's comment that he feels himself to be head of the house in
church - "And I've always been the head of my house," he adds (Heilbut
1971: 86) - to the role Charles Keil describes Bobby Bland fulfilling in his
own performances. Bland uses melisma of the type "derived directly from
the intensely emotional services of the Negro fundamentalist churches"
(1966: 124), and through his "moralizing and preaching not from any supe-
rior vantage point but out of empathy" and use of church-related call-and-
response patterns, puts "the audience in the palm of his hand" and makes
himself and his listeners "one unit" (1966: 137). African American sacred
and secular musics have always shared similar modes of performance - vocal
timbres and patterns, the use of "blue" notes and melisma, percussive
elements and syncopation, for example - that made distinguishing between
them sometimes merely a matter of listening to the lyrics, as Langston
Hughes pointed out in Tambourines to Glory: to Big Eye Buddy Lomax's
assertion that "them gospel songs sound just like the blues," a sister responds
weakly, "At least our words is different" (1968: 126-7). Actually, both can
accomplish similar ends in terms of identifying and exposing problems to
community consideration, providing a communal common ground for
discussion, providing some sort of catharsis and relief, and giving the com-
munity itself a greater sense of coherence and cohesiveness, even if for only
a brief space, and sometimes, in the cases of blues performers, only inciden-
tally. After all, for the blues performer this was a job, not necessarily a calling,
and the sometimes dissolute and promiscuous lives of blues singers did not
always lend themselves to an exemplary moral higher ground - though, of
course, the same could be said for some preachers as well. Ultimately, there
99 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
are blues performers such as Big Joe Duskin who insist on the distinction:
expressing displeasure at the fact that a recording company had released
his material under the title Boogie Woogie is My Religion, Duskin retorted,
"Boogie woogie ain't my religion, I'm a member of the Church of God."
Still, performers such as Duskin would not deny not only the sociopolitical
but also the moral accomplishments of the blues, as Ralph Bass explained:
I'll tell you the major contribution. Without getting up on the soap box,
without having marches, we brought blacks and whites together with
music. I remember in Atlanta, Georgia, when "The Twist" came out.
Hank Ballard was the featured act at this big club and they were
lined . . . the whites were lined up, they were lined up, blacks and whites
together, all down Auburn Avenue, to try to get into this club. The police
came, man, andtheysaid "We'll have a riot. Let 'em alone. Let 'em go." So
here, whites and blacks together. We gave them a common denominator,
a common love. We appealed to the one emotion that law couldn't do a
damn thing about, their common love of music. And so, I think, through
King and other labels, this was the great contribution: to break the shit
down . . . especially in the Deep South. Break it down. (Fox 1987)
Eddie Boyd described one of the musical experiences that made it impossible
for him to be a racist, despite a great deal of mistreatment at the hands of
whites:
So they had a little dressing room out back of the club, and this white
man, he put a strand of hay-baling wire across there and hung a whole
string of potato sacks up there and put on one side "Niggers" and (on
the other side) "White Folks" (laughs). Those white boys took a knife
and cut that sack down from end to end and piled it up in front of that
nightclub and poured kerosene on it and set it afire ... He said, "What
the hell this son of a bitch talking about? Putting a damn sheet up here
between us and y'all. It ain't hardly steppin' room in here. We play on the
same stage. He don't know music is natural international, don't give a
damn what color he is." I say, "Hello, brother, welcome to the club."
(Boyd 1977: 15)
And just as performers have frequently described the ways that audi-
ences segregated by ropes in dances found blues and r&b to be a rollicking
impetus to jostling and finally trampling on the cords of division, so they
have also seen blues and gospel music slowly over the years attract a diverse
audience as well as performers from outside the African American commu-
nity. After all, appearances at New York's Cafe Society and Carnegie Hall in
the 1940s by such performers as Sonny Terry, Big Bill Broonzy, the Boogie
Woogie Trio, Rosetta Tharpe, and the Dixie Hummingbirds, and perfor-
mances by groups like the Soul Stirrers for Roosevelt and Churchill on the
White House lawn, introduced the music to a whole new audience that
700 Steve Tracy
responded enthusiastically to its artistry, even if it was in a rarified setting
that did not always help produce performances in their most unadulter-
ated form. Lena Home's scripted introduction of Ammons and Johnson in
the film "Boogie Woogie Dream" - "It has always been their greatest de-
sire to play their music to a select society in a cafe like this" - feels rather
condescending and disingenuous, yet such venues were the gateways to
mainstream acceptability and greater economic success. Additionally, the
airwaves provided unrestricted access to radio shows such as Joe Bostic's
"Gospel Train" in the 1940s; Mahalia Jackson's C.B.S. radio program, which
premiered on September 26, 1954; the sounds emanating from W.D.I.A.
in Memphis and from their Goodwill Revues; as well as appearances of
performers on such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show and the Dinah
Shore Show, and numerous other radio shows featuring blues and gospel
talent, which made white presence at live appearances inevitable. Just as
inevitably, as racial barriers relaxed, integrated bands emerged as more
common, especially beginning in the 1960s, sparking occasional cries of
"nigger lover" on the one hand, and charges of pandering to whites on
the other as blues performers attempted to negotiate the racial divide and
"legitimize" their decisions to alter the complexion of blues bands. White
performers have frequently enjoyed greater access to higher-paying venues
and record contracts and sales that have prompted frustration among black
performers; on the other hand, there are some facilities that have expressed
an unwillingness to book white performers, feeling their audiences would
prefer "African American originators" to "white interpreters." Increasingly,
however, "mixed" audiences seem to have become more comfortable en-
joying the music alongside each other. Although there have occasionally
been efforts to "explain" references to African American culture to white
audiences or legitimize the blues tradition in reference to the lives of whites,
as in B. B. King's "Lucille" or Albert King's "Blues Power," in general the
music now seems to speak naturally and unselfconsciously to its audience.
Paradoxically, churches seem to be far less integrated than blues clubs and
festivals, so gospel performances are more likely to reach an audience a
higher percentage of which is African American, possibly in part due to the
personal nature of religious affiliations on the one hand and the role that
religion plays in establishing and maintaining group identity and cohesive -
ness on the other, though inevitably an element of racism is also reflected
in such willful separation. The entry of blues and gospel directly into the
mainstream of U.S. culture - as opposed to indirectly through cross-cultural
influence - has seen the blues leave juke joint and back porch for tours
such as the American Folk Blues Festival in the 1960s and early 1970s, and
events sponsored by large tobacco and alcohol companies anxious to cash
in on the blues' appeal. Nevertheless, one can encounter blues and gospel
1 01 "Black twice": performance conditions for blues and gospel artists
in small, informal venues where it continues to serve its intimate, personal
functions unconnected to the commercialism that sometimes threatens to
engulf it.
As John Cephas pointed out, the catalog of performance conditions for
blues and gospel performers includes a wide variety of elements, most of
which pre- and post-date the actual performance itself. When the blues
come falling down like dark night showers of rain, after all, they fall on
musicians who are, as B. B. King says, black twice, meaning that to all of the
conditions and pressures of being black in America are added the special
difficulties faced by musicians working their way through a world sometimes
hostile to the mobile and public creative artist in an undervalued idiom. The
performance should be understood in the context of all of these experiences,
notable for its grace, power, and validity both because of and despite the
many impediments facing blues and gospel performers out to provide a bit
of consolation for the weary in the wee wee hours of the dark nights of their
souls.
7 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
BARB JUNGR
The human voice is like a thumb print, aurally and spectrally identifiable.
The extraordinarily affecting voices of gospel and blues singers have, in
their recordings, given us access to those singers' deepest emotions and, in
so doing, allowed us to glimpse their individual and common struggles for
dignity and freedom in an often terrifyingly hostile environment. Unlike
other instruments, the voice emanates from and is played inside the body.
In this respect it is unique. Contemporary understanding of "voice" must
therefore incorporate the connection between the personality, physicality,
spirituality, individual experience and social history of each singer. For the
listener, description of these singers' vocal production is fraught with dif-
ficulties not least because the plethora of interpretations reflect individual
singers' personal expression, as well as their commonality of experience
in African American culture and society pre- and post-slavery. My own
responses to this work emerge from my love of these musics and singers,
and are subject also to my own cultural understanding and experience as
both listener and singer/teacher. There are so many elements to "voice" that
this brief chapter may only scratch the surface of the many extraordinary
vocal performances in these genres. Each individual "voice" has its own
story, its own personal history. I have focused on particular singers and
examples in an attempt to raise some of the aspects of these relationships,
personally, stylistically and in the context of their culture and society, but
the voices I omit are by no means less important. Their omission is due to
constraints of space and does not represent any aesthetic judgment on my
own part. Furthermore, there is an established body of work in both African
American cultural history and blues and gospel, on which I have drawn in an
effort to be sensitive to the relationship of voice to personal and communal
history.
The heritage of the great blues and gospel singers is largely and uniquely
preserved on recordings, giving us access to performances by singers many
of whom are now dead. 1 Some recordings are "acoustic" - that is to say, the
performance has been recorded in an ethnomusicologically "authentic"
manner, in the field (for example the many recordings made by Alan Lomax
on porches, in churches and around campfires across the southern states).
Some are studio based, wherein the voice may have been treated or modified
[102] by post-recording techniques (such as the more recent recordings of Sweet
103 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
Honey In The Rock, where voices have been overdubbed to create certain
effects, or the contemporary recordings of Sounds Of Blackness with
complex studio production). Some are so old that microphones and
recording techniques used were too insensitive to give anything other than
an approximation of the singer's "real" voice (Marie Bradley's blues singing
is almost obscured by the surface recording noises of her 1927 recordings) . It
is evident from almost everything written about Bessie Smith that what she
was doing in performance and what has been preserved in recorded sound
are two quite different phenomena. Smith's work is variously described as
being almost mesmerizing, as being so commanding and loud she didn't
need a microphone even in a big hall, and is perhaps best summed up by
a comment by the late Frank Schiffman, owner of Harlem's Apollo and
Lafayette Theatres when Bessie appeared there as a headliner. "Whatever
pathos there is in this world, whatever sadness she had, was brought out in
her singing - and the audience knew it and responded to it." 2 The literature
on both genres is filled with what the voice analyst Laver (1980) has
called "the adjectival approach": voices are vaguely described as "pinched,"
"strained," "rasping," "full," "thin," and "nasal," to note a few. Terminologies
are confused and further complicated when different listeners hear the
same singer, for their perceptions of the performance are filtered through a
wealth of associations, cultural aesthetics and personal preferences for the
sounds to which they are listening and to which they ascribe meaning.
Using three approaches, the question of "voice" in the analysis of blues
and gospel vocal production (timbre or vocal tone, ornamentation, vocal
and performance aesthetic, and characteristic stylistic features) is identifi-
able and can be discussed in terms of the relationship to African American
society and culture.
The Lomax approach
Alan Lomax, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and major archivist of American
musics, played a central part in recording performances by many African
Americans in the rural South, and assisted and actively promoted the
careers of many artists including Leadbelly, Jelly Roll Morton, and Muddy
Waters. Lomax identified stylistic traits using an analytical system to code
songstyle and vocal production in the Cantometrics project. Traits partic-
ularly relevant to this discussion include vocal group, vocal organization,
range, interval width, embellishment, volume, rubato, glissandi, melisma,
tremolo, glottal effect, register, vocal width, nasality, vocal noise, accent, and
consonants. These were assessed aurally and thus graded graphically. Lomax
identified certain features of songstyle identifying the "gospel" tradition.
104 Barb Jungr
Unsurprisingly, he found strong similarities in songstyle features from
African and African American examples particularly those pertaining to
vocal parameters. Working with the Alabaman singer Vera Hall, Lomax ob-
served that "components of this spiritual style reinforce its cohesive effect," 3
noting that the songs were refrain-based and that melodies were "brief and
repetitious" affording easy participation, that strong beats and pulse allowed
everyone to follow the meter and, interestingly, that "it is mellow voiced - a
psychological cue inviting and welcoming others." Lomax's work has been
heavily criticized, but he proposed that "music expresses emotion; therefore
when a distinctive and consistent musical style lives in a culture . . . one can
posit the existence of a distinctive set of emotional needs or drives that are
somehow satisfied or evoked by this music" (Lomax 1962: 125). In terms of
the relationship of the "voice" to both the blues and gospel, encompassing
the individual singing, the group singing, the expression of otherwise sup-
pressed narrative, spiritual, sexual and emotional information, the individ-
ual physical act of making sound, the psychological implications of that, and
finally the political expression of the community, Lomax was identifying a
quite contemporary view of what "voice" in blues and gospel may, indeed, be
voicing.
Using Lomax's analysis, specific features help define the singing style of
both gospel and blues singers. These are chiefly centered in ornamentation
features:
• embellishment (very clearly displayed in Carolyn Bolger-Payne's version of
"Precious Lord");
• vocal width: use of falsetto in male singers (Houston Stackhouse singing
"Cool Drink Of Water") and vocal "jumps" from lower to higher register in
women singers (Marie Bradley's glissandi into the soprano register from the
modal voice 4 );
• melisma, rubato, and glissandi (a dominant feature of Jessie May Hill's per-
formance as she slides between mid-line pitches).
Slides, wails, sobs, whooping and vocal sounds used in singing but
originating in expressive speech are also definitive as in Robert Johnson's
whoops between the text, and John Lee Hooker's spoken delivery. Indeed,
the line between preaching in recognizable rhythms and pitch inflections
and singing is often very thin. However, nasality, register, tremolo, range,
glottal, vocal noise, accent and consonants are also displayed by all singers
to a greater or lesser degree.
"Nasality" as Lomax understands it is more evident in John Brim's and
Memphis Slim's voices, less in Chuck Berry and Howlin' Wolf's. Register is
high for Buddy Guy, who moves into falsetto singing at the top of his lower
range, often ending a raised note in a little cry. Etta James' voice becomes
105 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
lower throughout her career. On her 1967 recording of "Tell Mama" she
sings in a mid-modal register sliding into falsetto for effect, while she sings
in a progressively lower modal voice on her recordings twenty years later.
Robert Johnson uses the jump into falsetto with effect in his 1936 recording
of "Kindhearted Woman's Blues." In gospel harmony groups the full ranges
of registers are in evidence - no one register or range determines the styles.
As for vibrato, Ruth Brown has hardly any in her shouting rhythm and
blues, whereas La Vern Baker uses fast vibrato on sustained notes, as does
Bessie Smith. Lomax uses "glottal" to mean glottal shake which is not used
extensively in either genre but is evident at times in the individual singing
of John Lee Hooker. However, glottal attack varies greatly between individ-
ual singers. Some singers use a marked degree of vocal noise or "raspiness"
(Clarence Fountain of The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Howlin' Wolf, Blind
Willie Johnson), some have a purer vocal timbre (some of Mahalia Jackson's
performances, and the many exponents of the concert gospel tradition in-
cluding The Princely Players, The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the many other
African American U.S. university and collegiate choirs whose vocal training
was greatly influenced by the Western classical model).
In features such as melodic shape, phrase length and text load there is
no central model (while the descending vocal lines of blues singers have
received attention, this is by no means definitive), but vocal group and
vocal organization are found in the sub-groups of gospel choirs and jubilee
harmony groups. Definitively the blues singer is a soloist, even if working
with a band of supporting musicians, and the gospel singer may sing alone
(Mahalia Jackson), with a group (Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers), or in a
group with textural blending (Sweet Honey In The Rock). Comparing the
use of this model in the songstyles of classical North Indian, or Western
classical vocalizing many parameters would clearly be positively marked as
defining features of both.
The Estill approach
Using the vocal model proposed by the voice specialist Jo Estill raises other
possibilities. 5 Estill separated six specific and audible vocal parameters:
opera, twang, belt, speech, sob, and falsetto (the meaning of this is distinct
from that of male vocal register in Western classical terminology). Singers
usually use more than one quality, while some are often found together:
opera includes a quality of twang, as does belt. Conversational and more
relaxed singing uses speech and sometimes falsetto qualities. Tommy Tucker
and Elder Charlie Beck use both speech and twang, Michelle Lanchester's
voice displays a quality of falsetto in which the back of the vocal folds is
106 Barb Jungr
open but not adducting, creating a sound which might otherwise be incor-
rectly described as "breathy." Cry is a variation of sob, using a higher larynx
position: the larynx is not tilted in speech or falsetto; here the larynx is in
a mid-position, sitting neither high nor low. The key difference between
cry, speech and falsetto is the postural change in the larynx, i.e. the thyroid
cartilage is titled forward.
Twang and cry are heard frequently in gospel and blues singing. They
both include in their physical set a tilted thyroid which stretches the vocal
folds to thin them, while vibrato is a feature of the vocal production. Twang
is evident in most of the blues and gospel singers' vocal deliveries. Cry is a
distinctive quality heard as a sweetness in the voice and is audible in Joshua
White, Bo Diddley, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Bessie Smith, Sam
Cooke, Dorothy Love Coates and Brother Joe May.
Kayes describes the opera quality as characterized by a tilted thyroid and
a low larynx position. She notes that (as in belting) a high degree of phy-
sical "anchoring" is necessary in the body to provide the physical support
in the back, neck, spine and torso to produce high sub-glottal pressure and
"support" loud and full vocal tone projection. In addition, the vocal folds
are thick and the closed phase of the folds is long. Opera and belt are com-
plex voice qualities that include twang in their "set up." Western classi-
cal training emphasizes register definition into soprano, mezzo, alto, tenor,
baritone and bass with a corresponding use of a lower, tilted larynx position
and with emphasis on a "clear" vocal timbre with vibrato and legato singing
supported by particular breathing techniques. 6 Opera is clearly audible in
some singers' voices, most particularly those "schooled" in the Western
classical tradition, evident in the late nineteenth- century collegiate choirs. 7
Gifted musicians such as Harry T. Burleigh (himself a baritone) trained
singers in conservatoire environments and this work was clearly audible in
the singing of arranged spirituals. As composers learned the form of and
wrote for Western classical registers, tutors taught the vocal requirements
for this style of singing. These styles sometimes influenced show and musical
singing, with performers moving between each, and can in turn be heard
in the recorded performances of blues singers who "crossed over" genres in
the early twentieth century (for example in the modal or contralto singing
of blues recordings of the successful show performer Josephine Byrd) . Some
writers infer that singers such as Bessie Smith used elements of Western clas-
sical technique in her controlled legato phrases and breath use and control.
Well, singers learn by imitation. If they can duplicate what they hear, they
may appropriate vocal techniques into their own singing, and with the ex-
plosion of performance possibilities for African Americans in the early part
of the last century where singers moved between engagements in vaudeville,
tent shows, musicals, theatre shows, concert, clubs and roadhouses, a fer-
tile ground was provided for vocal performers to enhance their crafts by
107 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
providing many diverse examples of delivery. Fashion also played a part in
this, particularly in the recording industry Many early female blues record-
ings display more than a passing nod to show and vaudeville traditions
both in the texts sung and in the vocal deliveries. Singers who used cry,
providing sweetness of tone, moved quickly into vaudeville and shows, and
were recorded easily. Bessie Smith's supported style of singing was suited to
recording and concert. In other words the type of singing delivery correlated
with the performance environment. A "shouter" would gravitate naturally
through performance opportunity to r&b, a sweet singer to cabaret and
vaudeville, a big-voiced singer would be better able to work in tent shows,
where the capacity to belt would be an asset.
Belt is a full-throttle sound and is very evident when singers seem on
the edge of their voice and emotion: one can almost hear the physical effort
employed to make the sound, and it is a quality that would have been very
valuable before amplification as it enables high-powered sound to be made
and heard over other instruments. When gospel singers appear to be "upping
the ante" with a highly exciting sound they are belting, usually also employing
twang. Koko Taylor sometimes uses belt, as does Bessie Smith, Etta James,
Sam Cooke, Dorothy Love Coates, and Gloria Griffin. When a gospel choir
"takes off," the exciting sound is heard as and partly created by many singers
belting simultaneously (Michelle Lanchester, Bernice Johnson Reagan and
Yasmeen singing together, Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, The Clarke
Sisters and Dorothy Love Coates with the original Gospel Harmonettes all
demonstrate this very effectively).
Kayes listened with me to a variety of recordings and in discussion identi-
fied twang as present in almost all examples of the blues and gospel singers we
heard. Cry, belt and speech were used by most singers in various combina-
tions. Falsetto was rare and opera quality not in evidence with the exception
of those aforementioned singers schooled in a Western classical tradition.
Some singers (Brother Joe May, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Blind Gary Davis)
produced a sob-like quality which is the quality of cry but with a lowered
larynx and some used a constricted throat to produce what Lomax would
have called raspiness and what is also heard as vocal noise or disruption.
Estill's model reveals twang&s a central component of vocal tone in blues and
gospel, used most frequently in conjunction with speech, cry, sob and belt.
The Wolfsohn approach
Alfred Wolfsohn's pioneering work linking vocal timbre to physical, psy-
chological and emotional states was developed both by Paul Newham to
be used in psychotherapeutic voice work, and by members of the Roy Hart
Theatre for use in a theatrical context to produce very extreme and affecting
108 Barb Jungr
vocal production. 8 Focusing on the width and length of the vocal tract and
linking psychological states to specific vocal productions, this method (like
Estill's) is taught in praxis. Practitioners learn to identify emotional states
by mimicking the vocal tract settings of the client thus empathizing physi-
cally, which enables them to diagnose accordingly. In respect of blues and
gospel singing, put simply, if a singer uses a vocal setting that creates an ex-
citing sound, the sound will be heard as such by the listener and will, more
importantly, create an "excitable" emotional state in the body and being
of the singer. These "effects" seem to be felt across cultural and aesthetic
boundaries without respect to the listener's cultural competence, although
there is no available research on this. There is considerable evidence linking
elements of vocal production with psychological state 9 and this is important
in the discussion of the vocal productions of blues and gospel singers, given
the developments of these genres within the social, historical and political
contexts of African American communities.
Melanie Harrold has studied extensively with voice and psychotherapy
and in discussion with me provided observations of these states in the
timbres of various singers of the genres. Chuck Berry's non-threatening,
warm tone suggests "come here," when coupled with lyrics such as those
of "In The Wee Wee Hours." With his easy glottal attack and speech-like
delivery and relaxed intrinsic muscles, we sense a mother need. Compared
to Muddy Waters' sexual singing, with the voice emanating from deep inside
his being, we have a full sense of his "embodied" voice. His singing is not
intellectual, but entirely responsive to his body need. Buddy Guy's shouting
suggests a need to be heard, almost a desperateness. With his higher middle
register tipping into occasional falsetto with small cries, there is a "lost"
quality to him. Elmore James, with his high, thin tenor voice using a high
larynx position with a lot of twang, accesses his heart in his singing, and
uses a great deal of forward resonance. Little Walter uses the harmonica as
his voice, the harmonica becoming a mother's nipple, a pre-verbal and oral
experience of nurture. In contrast, Otis Rush seems to be "reaching," up and
over his middle register into his falsetto voice, towards heaven. As he sings
"So many roads, so many trains" crying "oh" in falsetto he holds the tension
of his high notes collapsing into his lower middle voice. 10
The speech factor is very illuminating. There is considerable research
linking certain vocal traits with sexuality (Laver 1 980) . In his spoken delivery
in "Walking The Blues," Willie Dixon's voice is experienced as deeply sexual;
easy, low in pitch, he seems relaxed and inviting. John Lee Hooker singing
"Sugar Mama" again uses the narrative voice, the speech-like quality Estill
identifies, but Hooker moves from speech into a resonant singing voice with
the quality of twang and the sweetness of cry moving onto sob when the
larynx lowers. His singing is technically proficient as he allows his resonance
109 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
to work for him. Howlin' Wolf "asks for water" 11 moving from deep in the
throat into a falsetto cry, then again collapsing down into the lower register.
Wolf's constriction of the throat gives a vocal noise quality, a rumble of a
barely emerging growl.
The use of vocal noise by singers as an effect in the blues allows access to
deeper feelings of emotion, both for singer and listener alike. Etta James on
"Tell Mama" shows a strength, that of the "total" woman, working against
what seems to be a weight on her chest and abdomen, and shouting, pushing
through the masculine force she finds herself surrounded by - not least of all
the full r&b arrangement. Her clear falsetto voice expresses her anger. Koko
Taylor uses constriction to suggest her strength and anger, her voice is clear
when she tells the story of "Wang Dang Doodle," but when she becomes
active, singing of "kicking down doors" a barely suppressed rage emerges
form the tight vocal noise she makes, a growl lending force to her lyrical
interpretation. In blues singing we as listeners experience the singers'
"reaching" inside for expression in each individual's style, reflecting a per-
sonal inner emotional state, but one we share through their performance.
There is often a vocal muscular contact of the active emotional centers,
focused around tension and release.
Gospel singing, whilst employing the same varieties of individual vocal
timbres, looks "up," outwards, reaching as if towards salvation, a better
life, and heaven. The gospel singer affirms existence, often in collective and
openly participatory singing, but exhibits the same sense of tension and
release, directed towards a different end. The gospel singer finds catharsis
by releasing emotion through the expressed voice, towards a spiritual union
with God. The Soul Stirrers provide almost a "spiritual backbone" for soloist
Sam Cooke, a spine onto which he as the lead voice can fall back and
feel supported allowing him full vocal, musical and emotional freedom of
expression. This is evident in all of the harmony groups where a soloist
"takes off" held up by the constant driving harmonies of the group.
Personal history and delivery
The human voice is completely connected to the physicality and psychology
of the person singing, so much so that it is impossible not to take this into
account when examining the idiosyncratic timbres present in both blues
and gospel singers. The work both of Estill and the schools of voice and
bodywork suggest that the singer operates stylistically through the form
of gospel and blues, expressing recognizable individual manipulation of
the musical forms, and also through the singer's personal "sound," which
is intimately connected to their personal and communal experience. The
110 Barb Jungr
personal histories of performers documented by such scholars as Heilbut
(1997) indicate the depth of these relationships.
Julius Cheeks joined the Nightingales Gospel Group in 1946, and they
soon became The Sensational Nightingales due to Cheeks' ability to take
the crowd "up" with the hard gospel style of singing characterized by Boyer
as "energetic and extremely intense solo and background singing, a preach-
ing style of delivery, and exaggerated physical gestures" (2000: 204). The
hard gospel style incorporates belt much more frequently than the softer
gospel style which Boyer characterizes as "close harmony, precise attacks
and releases, and underestimated - yet firm - rhythmic accentuation." Both
employ twangand beltto a degree, but there is more use of growling, crying,
and the kind of unrestrained shouting associated with preaching and ser-
monizing in the harder style. The effects of this kind of singing are powerful,
and drawn from deep roots within the singer's psyche:
At the other end of the post-war quartet spectrum stood the Sensational
Nightingales and another legend - Rev. Julius Cheeks. Where the (Swan)
Silvertones and the Spirit of Memphis captivated audiences with
exquisite understatements, the Sensational Nightingales devastated them
with diamond hard harmony and the primeval roaring lead of Julius
"June" Cheeks. Jo Jo Wallace, who sang tenor with the Nightingales for
thirty years, was brought up on the softer jubilee stylings of the Golden
Gates and the Jubalaires and remembers the shock of joining the
Nightingales: "It was almost like pulling my insides out, trying to sing
behind Cheeks. I'd be hoarse every night. I nearly killed myself trying to
make it with the Nightingales! I wasn't used to that style." Julius Cheeks
was born into grinding poverty in the same South Carolina town Ira
Tucker comes from. "It were bad, man. We didn't have a clock, we told
time by the sun. We didn't eat right, we lived off fat-back and molasses.
All us kids worked in the cotton fields, and Mama would whip me every
day . . . but she kept us straight." No proper schooling meant that he
couldn't read or write, but he got himself a recorded Bible when he was
twenty-four and played it to death . . . Julius "June" Cheeks died in 1980,
having left instructions that his body not be taken further South than
the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Baltimore, signifying his fierce hatred of
southern racism. His voice was lacerated from his twelve years on the
road with the Nightingales and some say he just about sang himself to
death, impervious to the warnings of doctors, until his voice - never a
refined instrument at the best of times - began to sound like gravel in a
tin bucket. His was the rawest of gospel's baritones - moving and painful
in its evocation of the roughest side of the mountain. Listening to the
Nightingales, it's possible to understand that Cheeks wasn't simply
indulging in nostalgia when he said towards the end of his life, "I sit here
sometimes and play my old records. I just cry. It'll make you cry, you
know." (Broughton 1996: 85-7)
Ill Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
The narrative style of delivery through which preaching becomes ser-
monizing becomes singing, moving into technically different deliveries, is
present in both blues and gospel. The movement of singers between the
genres reflects these similarities. With respect to the "hard" gospel sound,
there is a correlation with the tenor of much of the Old Testament, with an
angry, vengeful God who is to be celebrated and feared. Coupled with the
day-to-day dehumanizing effects of racism and abject poverty, expression
like Cheeks' is fueled by deep rage and a primal need to vocalize, to let this
out, to drive these emotions into something outside, something other than
what is. This is represented in this most powerful vocal delivery, where
singers are not performing, but connecting to deep feelings and expressing
them (like Cheeks), without thought of the subsequent consequence on
their voices. Where singing is not, for the vocalist, simply performance, this
affecting delivery is most manifest, and is felt alike both by singer and lis-
tener. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, also characterized by Boyer as "hard
gospel," sent members of their congregation to hospital rendering them so
over-excited by raising "the spirit"; some participants, it is said, went into
comas when they were playing, so powerful was the effect singing on their
audience (Broughton 1996). One must also be aware of the relationships
here of music to "trance" behavior, again in which the voice is a central
component. 12
For those singers whose work was not only about the gospels but was
also about consistent performance, the change into high gear with belt,
shouting and screaming are more infrequent during recorded performances
and probably during live appearances. Since the blues does not demand
the same specific performance aesthetic as gospel, blues singers belt, growl
and shout for effect correspondingly less, and as performers, in a more
"controlled" manner clear from recordings of singers whose style employs
such deliveries, for example, Koko Taylor, Etta James, and Sippie Wallace.
However, a similar relationship between personal story, voice and shared
cultural and societal experiences is clearly evident.
Other factors
The concept of learning in terms of style and timbre also merits comment.
In the early days of blues and gospel, singers learned from those in their
immediate vicinity, giving rise to geographical "schools" of vocal styles
recognized by blues scholars. The identification of geographic styles also
raises questions about the effects of dialect, local rhythmic and speech quali-
ties on singing styles, which demand more intensive analysis. The movement
between performance arenas allowed singers to see, hear and learn from
112 Barb Jungr
one another. Boyer notes that The Blind Boys Of Alabama were influenced
by The Golden Gate Quartet's radio broadcasts, on which the Blind Boys
modeled their early sound. Then, hearing that Archie Brownlee's Five Blind
Boys Of Mississippi were "tearing up churches" with their shrieking and
screaming style, they also adopted this means of vocalizing; finally when
they toured together both groups were singing "hard gospel" (Boyer 2000:
202-3). The growing accessibility of recordings provided another means of
"schooling" - that of imitation from recorded sources, which has influenced
generations of younger vocalists far beyond the shores of North America.
Jimmy Rushing's "shouting" style of blues singing was an influence on Walter
Dallas and Jimmy Witherspoon (Oliver 1997: 75). There is an acknowledged
understanding that the "gospel schooling" has been responsible for the basis
of the vocal inflections and mannerisms which moved beyond gospel and
provided the basis of vocal deliveries in early soul music and into contempo-
rary genres. The connection between the vocal deliveries, styles and general
performance aesthetic of blues and gospel is clear, without this singers from
Thomas Dorsey, Johnnie Taylor, Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, to Aretha
Franklin to name the more prominent could not have moved so effortlessly
between the sacred and the secular. Paul Oliver writes:
An early connection with the church was common to a very large
number of blues singers and musicians, whose ability to play an
instrument or sing at all was often due to their parents' religious
associations: the mother who played the organ, the father who preached
and lead a gospel choir are familiar in the backgrounds of innumerable
blues singers, from T-Bone Walker and Lightnin' Hopkins, Yank Rachell
and Otis Spann to Chuck Berry and Junior Wells. Not only were a large
number - perhaps the majority - of blues singers raised in God-fearing
families, but a high proportion of them also had their first experiences of
singing, and sometimes playing, in public in the churches of the South.
Singers whose careers were as varied as those of Bukka White, Sunnyland
Slim, Jimmy Witherspoon, B. B. King, Magic Sam and Little George
Buford commenced in this way. (1968: 84-5)
The frequent use of the male falsetto register is also indicative. In Malawi
high tenor to falsetto male voices are found in traditional music and in
Christianized choral work, where high register male singers will sometimes
sing in the soprano section of a choir. 13 Male falsetto voices in gospel and
blues have elements of cry, sob and twang, and individual timbres. In other
styles employing falsetto, there has been a prevalent tendency to regard the
high male white voice as "woman-ly." This happens in Western classical
music where register is, as Newham suggests, read culturally and as Frith
proposes for pop, gender may be mapped onto it. However, the timbre and
songstyle of the blues and gospel falsetto singer is highly individualized, and
113 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
is related to and emerges from the use of falsetto in some sub-Saharan African
cultures; its affect is read somewhat differently, and the vocal elements of
cry and sob (in, e.g., Marvin Gaye, Jackie Wilson) suggest the caring side of
heterosexually expressed "female-ness."
The microphone has had a profound effect on the vocal performances
of blues and gospel singers. Frith talks at length about the importance of the
microphone in popular music, which allows the voice to be heard in "close
up," providing a new intimacy which hitherto had been impossible through
the demands of rendering vocal projection in a manner that allowed the
voice simply to be heard (Frith 1998: 187-9). The development of the blues
as a musical form from the "shouting" style of the field hollers is well docu-
mented by Oliver, Baraka and others. Equally, the influence of the preaching
style of delivery within the gospel tradition has affected vocal performance
(the development of Aretha Franklin's distinctive phrasing is clearly
influenced by the preaching style of her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin). The
vocal requirements of pre-amplification deliveries demand a large physical
component and certain vocal qualities render the voice more audible in an
acoustic environment where the singer may be required to project over a
group, sometimes in the open air. Here, elements of belt and twang may be
deliberately employed to aid projection in the way that specific techniques
support projection of the voice in opera and musical theatre. Memphis
Minnie's voice clearly exhibits twang in her performances, and there is a clear
sense of power and physical support. In the rural blues, preaching blues, and
gospel recorded in churches before amplification became commonplace,
vocal deliveries often incorporate belting and some voices reveal an amount
of vocal noise caused by friction of the vocal folds in order to meet the
demands of constant high-pressured singing under adverse performance
conditions. The 1928 sermonizing combining singing and preaching by
Rev. Johnny Blakey of Chicago is almost painful to listen to, for the singers
are at the edge of their vocal limits and are actually shouting, Blakey 's voice
growling the sermon. Amplification and microphone- singing developed
alongside the growth of radio as a popular medium, and the blended vocal
sound of the "soft gospel" jubilee harmony groups effectively exploited this
in their close-harmony singing. Groups such as The Golden Gate Quartet
were perfect for radio, and radio was perfect for disseminating their dis-
tinctive styles and sounds across the continent. The microphone allows the
spoken delivery of John Lee Hooker, or the easy vocal quality of Willie Dixon,
to be heard over the amplified blues. It's unlikely that Bessie Smith would
have been heard over these sounds without a PA, despite her legendary
massive singing voice. The microphone is an essential ingredient to the
vocal production of amplified blues, some gospel singing, and influenced
directly the vocal style of specific performers and some harmony groups.
114 Barb Jungr
Conclusion
Dunn and Jones (1994) note the use of the word "voice" by feminists has
come to "refer to a wide range of aspirations: cultural agency, political en-
franchisement, sexual autonomy, and expressive freedom" historically de-
nied to women and it may be argued, to the emergent post-slavery African
American community "Voice" in this usage has become a metaphor for
textual authority, and alludes to the efforts of people to reclaim their own
experience through writing, or to the specific qualities of their literary and
cultural self-expression. Evolving from their African cultural history through
slavery and post-slavery in North America, the blues and gospel created
a "performance" (in the widest sense of the word) arena in which that
"voice" could be "embodied" to produce vocal expression in culturally
constrained and defined ways within blues and gospel which, simultane-
ously, encouraged full individual and personal expression. Thus all tim-
bres were acceptable, from the Western classical to the most raw. Each
singer who makes the transition from porch or yard to regular (as in the
Church) or professional (staged) performance, either by being so elected
within her community or by making the performance of blues and gospel
a "profession," displays a "grain" of voice, 14 a vocal timbre or tone and style
of vocal performance and indeed "embodied" physical performance that
is recognizable to the listener. In the context of blues and gospel, analysis
of the vocal productions of specific singers shows that there are no over-
riding specific techniques in common use to such an extent that one can
describe them as vocal production "norms" for the genres. Indeed, general
vocal deliveries of blues and gospel singers are not clearly defined as sep-
arate stylistically or tonally. Gospel and blues singers draw from the same
well of singing and timbral possibilities and uniquely manipulate those el-
ements individually. Embellishments, in Lomax's terminology, including
melisma, sounds originating in vocal expression and glissandi, are almost
always in evidence. The ability to improvise rhythmically and harmonically
and to inflect notes is part of this aesthetic, as many writers have noted. The
"voices" of blues and gospel singers, the physical individual sounds they
make, are as numerous as the performers of these genres. And if there is a
commonality in the vocal production, it is in a far deeper place than that
measured by any analysis of sound. It is rather in the nature of tropes like
"sincerity" and "transformation" (both of the self and the listener) which
cannot be discussed without taking into account the backgrounds of the
performers against a wider understanding of the development and history
of the African American community in the political landscape of North
America. Both blues and gospel are stylistically still contemporary musical
forms - that is to say, they are present today in many parts of the world. But
115 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
in describing the vocal productions from record of those originators of the
forms, contemporary singers must display the same understanding of inner
emotional commitment to the singing of the material, not the collection of
ornamentations which define the singing style. These factors, appropriated
by many popular music forms, and some non-African American performers
are often, though by no means always, superficial. It is in Krehbiel's quota-
tion at the front of Oliver's Screening the Blues 15 that the underlying quality
of voice in the performances of the great singers of both genres can be iden-
tified, "the spiritual." This is elusive, but audible. For, without the singer's
spiritual commitment, though the voice may praise the Lord, it won't get
the congregation's plane off the runway. Though it may describe the pain of
living or the joy of sex in words, it will not be "singing the blues."
8
The guitar
MATT BACKER
Of all the instruments associated with the blues, the guitar is predominant.
And of all the instruments associated with popular culture, the impact of
the blues on the guitar - be it in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton,
or Kurt Cobain - is incalculable. But where did it all start? Can you really
make a link between the psychedelic explosions of a pop icon (albeit one
who would regularly include blues standards in his repertoire) and a lay
preacher from the Mississippi Delta like Blind Willie Johnson? And what
about the link between the sacred and the secular forms of the music? Today
we tend to see blues and gospel as two distinct genres or, as is the case in
today's commercially driven world, two separate markets. As we shall see, it
wasn't always thus. The two branches share the same roots.
"You know, the blues come out of the field, baby," Sam "Lightning"
Hopkins told Sam Charters in 1964. "That's when you bend down, pickin'
that cotton and sing 'Oh Lord, please help me'. " Always a secular performer,
he was nonetheless at pains to acknowledge the important role of reli-
gion, underlining the way in which the line between blues and gospel is
often blurred. "The blues is a lot like church . . . when a preacher's up there
preachin' the Bible, he's honest to God tryin' to get you to understand these
things. Well, singin' the blues is the same thing" (Charters 1965: 375).
The legendary Texan could, and did, sing about different things. Fifty
years of performing seasoned, rather than altered, his particular blues and he
was emblematic of the rural origins and popular development of the music
and the guitar. Essentially a solo performer occasionally accompanied by
bass and drums, he almost invariably played a six-string flat-top acoustic
guitar, trademark thumb pick providing a constant rhythm, bare fingers
stroking the treble strings. He was discovered playing at a church social
gathering by the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Hopkins spent time
in prison, on chain gangs, rode boxcars, played at hobo camps and juke joints
and, by the late forties, had hit records. He found a new white audience in
the sixties and seventies, performing constantly until his death in 1982. Thus
he is a link between the pre-war Delta traditions and the modern age, not
unlike his contemporary, John Lee Hooker, but a more useful example due
to his direct contact with people like the aforementioned Jefferson.
Blind Lemon Jefferson is perhaps best known as the template for the
[116] joke which states that in order to be a blues man one needs a handle that is
117 The guitar
comprised in equal parts of: an affliction, a fruit, and the surname of a U.S.
president. In his time he was a star in both sacred and secular fields. He saw
himself first and foremost as a preacher, spreading the word both on and off
the pulpit. He would travel from church to church and hundreds of people
would flock to watch him perform. In a pre-mass media age, these meetings
were essential not only to the dissemination of the gospel, but also to the
music in all its variegated forms.
His technique incorporated a loose rhythmic feel and quite an inven-
tive and active instrumental approach, responding to accompanied vocal
phrases with single-note runs. There was none of the rhythmic strength of,
say, Robert Johnson whose grooves by comparison seem etched in stone.
Jefferson, like many of his contemporaries, sacrificed the structure in order
to accommodate the performance, his single-string breaks providing a fur-
ther breathing space in an already flexible sequence. His 1920s recording of
"Black Snake Moan" is typical of many rural blues pieces in that, although
following a repeated sequence that occurs every twelve bars or so, it does not
adhere to the traditional twelve-bar chord progression. Rather than rising
to the subdominant on bar 5, it drops down to a dominant chord based
in the sixth degree of the major scale in and around bar 7, returning to the
tonic at around bar 10 for the duration, before repeating (in the loosest
possible sense) the pattern. His single-note runs do not have the clarity of
his proteges', Hopkins appearing to have greater dexterity. No matter.
In an era when we have become accustomed to rigid computerized
rhythms, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the somewhat elastic sense
of meter used by some of these players. But we can still enjoy the con-
trasts between players like Jefferson and contemporaries like Mississippi
John Hurt, whose ornate and consistent finger picking sounds folksy and
Celtic by comparison. Jefferson stroked groups of strings with the flesh of
his fingers whereas Hurt would use alternating picking patterns more com-
mon to classical guitar or, as mentioned earlier, folk. His 1928 recording of
"Stack - O - Lee" (better known as the standard "Stagger Lee") evinces an
unusual degree of instrumental articulation for the genre and the period,
probably achieved through the use of fingerpicks (plectra worn on the thumb
and fingers of the picking hand) or very strong nails. Not long after this
recording Hurt slipped back into obscurity, only to reappear almost thirty
years later and be embraced by proponents of the folk craze. A late fifties
recording of "Candy Man Blues" from the Newport Folk Festival shows
that the voice, as you would expect, has been somewhat seasoned, but the
picking remains as sprightly as ever. One can only imagine what fans of
Peter, Paul, and Mary made of the bawdy lyrics.
Blind Willie Johnson shared an infirmity, a Founding Father's surname,
and a vocation with Jefferson. Both were preachers and would have thought
778 Matt Backer
themselves out-and-out gospel performers, possibly regarding music as a
sideline to their church work. Johnson would have been unlikely to consider
himself a virtuoso slide guitarist, responsible for some profound and moving
recordings.
Slide guitar is often identified with the blues, but is reckoned to have
originated in Hawaii. Towards the end of World War I a Polynesian craze
swept the United States, and touring troupes of Hawaiian musicians played
to full houses across the country Performing traditional songs, they utilized
"slack key" guitar, wherein a metal bar was slid across raised strings tuned
to an open chord - a sound quite familiar now, but revolutionary then.
Common tunings included, and still include: open D (strings tuned
D-A-D-FJJ-A-D - lowest string to highest), open E (which consists of the
same intervals a tone higher), open G (which is D-G-D-G-B-D low to
high - this tuning is responsible for a disproportionately high number of
songs by the Rolling Stones) and open A (which again is the same tuning a
tone higher). Various players adopted favorite tunings. Blind Willie McTell
appeared to be fond of D, Robert Johnson of G. I say, "appeared" because
of the lack of specific information; other than a few recordings, our only
evidence is anecdotal and aural.
Knowledge of the Hawaiian craze would have been likely to have seeped
into backwaters of the Deep South, and to have adapted itself well to the sort
of instrument likely to have been owned by an itinerant sharecropper, one
rather difficult to fret with a warped or broken neck. Techniques associated
with the Diddly Bow (from whence Elias McDaniel derived his pseudonym,
Bo Diddley) would have applied. This simple instrument was created by
stretching a piece of wire or string over a nail hammered into a board, box,
or even the side of a house. A piece of metal or glass, such as a bottle or
can, was then used to touch the string at various points along its vibrating
length to create different pitches while it was strummed, plucked, or picked
(Palmer 1991).
The term "bottleneck guitar" describes the preference some players had
(and have) for breaking or sawing off the neck of a bottle and wearing
it over a finger. Others would use a piece of copper or chrome tubing,
bone, and socket wrench or, in Blind Willie Johnson's case, a pocket knife.
Sliding produces vibrato, glissandi, bends, and microtonal inflections that
can emulate a human voice. In the correct hands, it is an extremely expressive
instrument.
Johnson was possessed of such a pair of hands. His 1929 recording of
"God Don't Never Change" is inspired and inspiring. Evoking the omnipo-
tence of the Almighty in an almost laconic way, he ignores any standard
chord progression instead relying on eight-bar phrases repeated over a
monotone, alternating a verse and refrain. He provides a solid bass groove
119 The guitar
whilst doubling the vocal melody with the slide. Fans of guitarist and sound-
track composer Ry Cooder would particularly enjoy it. Indeed Cooder cites
Johnson's 1927 recording of "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"
as the inspiration for the memorable theme to the Wim Wenders film
"Paris, Texas." Richard Spotswood says of "Dark Was The Night":
I'll resist the temptation to match the emotional eloquence of this
performance with words of my own; certainly it belongs on any list of
the greatest records ever, powerfully illustrating the spiritual appeal the
slide guitar has in the hands of a master ... a nearly wordless prayer in
the form of an intimate dialogue between Johnson and his instrument,
assuming the status of performance only through the presence of a
microphone. (Spotswood 1991)
The difference between him and his namesake, Robert Johnson, who Charles
Shaar Murray calls "the most mythically correct" (Shaar Murray 1999: 399)
blues artist, could not be starker. Whereas Blind Willie sang of the Lord's
intransigence, Robert sang "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day" or
"Me And The Devil." His songs could be roughly divided into the secular, the
misogynistic, and the blasphemous: his impact on rock music is incalculable.
Led Zeppelin famously cribbed his line in "Travelling Riverside Blues" in
which he suggests that his intended might like to "squeeze my lemon 'til
the juice runs down my leg," the Rolling Stones covered "Love In Vain" and
"Stop Breakin' Down" and Cream's version of "Crossroads" brought the
story of Johnson's alleged pact with the devil to an audience of millions. We
have twenty-eight songs and one photograph of him - in which he is dressed
in a snappy suit, wearing a wide brimmed hat, and holding an expensive
Gibson guitar - not standard fare for an itinerant blues man. Not unlike
Christopher Marlowe, the exact manner, place, and reason for his death are
shrouded in mystery.
He must have been the Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker of his day. The
recordings indicate a finesse and swagger unequalled (to the best of our
knowledge) by his peers. He is recorded solo, but making enough noise
for several men. The rhythm is solid. One could even describe it as funky.
Using what sounds like his bare fingers alternating with his thumb, he clearly
articulates slide phrases that have now become staples of the musical diet,
such as the signature riff to "Travelling Riverside Blues" or emulating the
sound of the famous squeezed lemon in the same song.
Alan Lomax, the Library of Congress musicologist who documented
Johnson and many others with his field recordings, recalls that the sessions
took place in his hotel room and that Johnson was so shy that he faced
the wall. Ry Cooder, in a 1982 BBC radio interview, believes that this was
not due to timidity at all, but was Johnson utilizing a technique called
720 Matt Backer
"corner loading" which entails playing towards hard surfaces, which are at
right angles to each other in order to increase ambience and bass response.
The quality of the recordings is remarkably good, as are the performances.
The playing is assured; the time is solid although the tempo increases. This
has the effect of building excitement as the acceleration is gradual and
consistent, and the instrument is well in tune and, at a guess, outfitted with
new strings.
Unlikely as it may seem, Johnson had a mentor in the form of the singer,
preacher and slide guitarist Son House, whose devotion to his calling would
ensure that his secular performances would remain sporadic until his death
in the sixties. Another of his proteges was Muddy Waters, to whom we will
return later, and yet another associate was a little-known preacher and gui-
tarist, Will Moore. It is not surprising that many of the principal characters
in the story of the blues first encountered each other in the Mississippi
countryside, and there are many minor players who were important ingre-
dients in the area's rich musical stew, and in some ways were patrons of the
arts. Moore is such an example, who would no doubt have been forgotten
but for the exploits of his stepson, John Lee Hooker.
The stepfather seems to have been eager to protect his charge from the
pernicious influences of the world of music, teaching the young Hooker the
songs and techniques of his contemporaries yet forbidding him to perform.
This merely strengthened the boy's resolve, and he proceeded to move north
in and around 1933 (exact dates are never a forte of blues chronology).
His apprenticeship was long, and not necessarily easy. His moves, first
to Memphis, later to Cincinnati, and finally to Detroit (but, interestingly
enough, not to Chicago) seem to reflect the migratory patterns of rural
black America in the years leading up to and including the war. He played
in clubs and juke joints, solo and accompanied, worked as a janitor, cinema
usher and in a car factory, all the while maintaining his primordial Delta
style. Whether he played electric or acoustic guitar, he never abandoned the
bare-fingered strumming interrupted by occasional single-note bursts that
remains his stock-in-trade.
By 1948 he was popular enough in the Detroit area to come to the atten-
tion of a white record producer, Bernard Besman. In those days, producers
did little more than try to capture a live performance as quickly as possible.
Besman was unusually experimental, using techniques which would not be-
come commonplace for another two decades, although his motivation was
purely fiscal - the budget did not extend to paying for a band: the producer
recalls trying to fill out the sound as much as possible (Shaar Murray 1999:
131-3). He put a cardboard box beneath Hooker's stomping foot in order
to re-create something akin to a rhythm section and placed a microphone
very close to his guitar and overloaded the input channel of the recorder,
727 The guitar
creating a deceptively electric sound. A speaker was then placed in front
of a toilet bowl, recorded, and mixed in with the original signal, produc-
ing a revolutionary slapback echo. One song from these sessions, "Boogie
Chillun," went on to sell a million copies, and Hooker's journey to interna-
tional stardom had begun.
Whether alone in a recording studio in the forties, or duetting in the
nineties with Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, or Keith Richards, his approach
remains remarkably consistent: seated, foot tapping, thumb-down stroking
the bass strings, index finger stroking the treble strings, rhythm occasionally
broken by flurries of higher- register notes. An open string will often drone
the tonic throughout, and Hooker's tendency to avoid chord changes or
to change in unusual places (in the great Delta tradition, ten-, eleven- and
thirteen-and-a-half-bar phrases are not uncommon) adds to the exotic
quality of his music. His favored tunings are either standard or open A,
which many blues players refer to as "Spanish" tuning. Whoever sits in with
him has to adapt to his way of doing things, and he has produced a surpris-
ing number of successful recordings with guest stars, like "Hooker n'Heat,"
"The Healer," and "Mr. Lucky," where the guests never swamp or dilute
the artist's identity. Comparison between the performance of "I Cover
The Waterfront" on his mid-sixties album The Real Folk Blues and the same
song on his 1991 album Mr. Lucky is instructive. The former is remarkably
sparse, accompanied only by the artist's foot and some spare strummed
electric guitar. Using first-position open chords and strumming using the
flesh of his fingers or thumb, the result is truly an example of the dictum
"less is more." The more recent version, a duet with Van Morrison, has the
backing of a full band including Hammond organ, bass, drums played with
brushes, and Morrison playing the guitar part, an insistent sixteenth-note
triplet part on electric guitar, probably played using a plectrum and down
strokes (at least that's what he did when I played with him). While this ver-
sion respects the artist's integrity and approach, it somehow is less evocative,
coloring in as it does the spaces left blank on the original version.
While Hooker was developing his electrified swamp shuffle in Detroit,
another transplanted Deltan was making significant waves in Chicago.
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, is best remem-
bered as a singer, bandleader and songwriter - songs like "Mannish Boy,"
"Hootchie Kootchie Man," and "Seventh Son" are now standards, and popu-
lar culture would be very different if he had not written "Rolling Stone." His
influence as a guitarist cannot be underestimated either, bearing in mind
his utilization of a particular twentieth-century commodity - electricity.
Until the late 1 940s, with the possible exception of modern classical com-
posers and/or boffins like Leon Theremin and Pierre Schaeffer, technology
had not altered the sound of music significantly since the invention of the
722 Matt Backer
saxophone. Forms were changing in classical and jazz music, but instru-
mental timbres remained unaltered. Whatever squeaks and scrapes might
be coaxed from, for example, a violin, it remained a violin, be it in a piece by
Schubert or Schoenberg, and one can argue that, addition of valves notwith-
standing, there isn't a great deal of difference between the instrument used
in "Trumpet Voluntary" and that played by Dizzy Gillespie.
Amplification was used sparingly in the late thirties, and allowed cer-
tain revolutions in technique. Frank Sinatra would not have been able to
develop his singular phrasing without the aid of a microphone, and Charlie
Christian's guitar would never have become a lead instrument in Benny
Goodman's band. These were, however, amplified sounds in the true sense
of the word - a human voice made audible over a big band, the sound
of an arch-top guitar increased so that single notes could carry. Up until
the 1970s, jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, or Kenny Burrell
continued to use the technique pioneered by Christian, using a naturalistic
clean sound, particularly suited to sophisticated chord voicings.
As bands like Muddy Waters' or his contemporary Howlin' Wolf's played
to increasingly full rooms in an increasingly loud world, they had to increase
their volume in order to compete, and in so doing, taxed their equipment
to the limit. The distortion that results from an amplifier being overdriven
compresses the signal, producing increased sustain and frequency limita-
tion. The combination of electric guitar and an amplifier behaving in such
a manner produced something akin to a new instrument, so far removed
from its origins that classical guitar maestro Andres Segovia would describe
it as an abomination.
This meant that when Waters sang, "I'm a King Bee," he could produce
an onomatopoeic sound with his slide on the upper register of his guitar,
which would have been untenable on an acoustic instrument. Similarly, his
band mate, the harmonica player Little Walter, would amplify his instrument
resulting in a sound akin to an entire horn section. Using techniques such
as note bending and crossing (using the tonality produced by inhaling as
opposed to exhaling as the root) and playing through a distorted amplifier
produced a powerful new lead instrument which, when allied with the
electric guitar, took the music out of the swamp forever.
The tonality of an overdriven amplifier is not unlike a human voice or
a horn. Inflection and phrasing oddities like glissandi and vibrato become
more apparent. Notes take longer to decay, facilitating string bending. B. B.
King, often considered to be the string-bending pioneer, claims that igno-
rance and a certain lack of technique forced him to emulate the sound made
by his cousin, Bukka White. King was apparently unable to get to grips with
a slide, and found other ways of producing a similar sound, and made the
world a better place. As regards his technique, he says:
123 The guitar
I felt that when I trilled my hand, I got this sound that my ears say was
similar to using a bottleneck, because I never could do it the usual way.
Like I say, I've got stupid fingers that just won't work.
(Tobler and Grundy 1983: 14)
His stupid fingers helped produce a creamy, vocal tone that is probably the
most influential sound in the history of the electric guitar, as is his unique
quick vibrato, achieved by using the knuckle of the left-hand index finger as
a fulcrum and letting a rocking action of the hand move the string from side
to side. Combining a Gibson 355 model (he favored ES 5 s and L5s in the
fifties, switching to the semi-hollow 300 series upon its introduction in 1 958)
with a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier, his tweaks, trills and sustained notes
have ensured that the voice of his guitar, named Lucille, is as prominent as
his own, and has wormed its way into the sound and technique of countless
others including Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and Peter Green. Again, the
combination of guitar and amp is of paramount importance here, as well
as learning the dynamics of both. Dr. King, again:
That's technique, which comes from practising, and it also comes from
having a pretty good ear that's able to work with the volume and
feedback of the amp in such a way that it eventually becomes
professional. What I'm trying to say is that anybody can just turn the
guitar up and scream, but to be able to control it without going to your
volume controls, but using your ear to tell you when it's getting too loud
or not loud enough, takes technique, because you've got to work with
the frets there . . . (Tobler and Grundy 1983: 14)
At the time of writing, King continues to record, and performs hundreds
of times per year. Most people are familiar with his soulful, horn-drenched
sound. Always the leader of big bands, his tight jazzy revue can be linked
to T-Bone Walker's, whose sophisticated brand of big band blues came out
of Texas at about the same time as Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown's, the
only blues artiste mentioned here that this writer has had the pleasure of
working with. Both owing a lot to singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan, they
would use horn sections and sophisticated chord voicings and substitutions.
In a 1997 interview with Jas Obrecht, Brown referred to his tendency to
view his guitar as part of the horn section, and to differentiate himself as a
performer:
I'm playin' them horn lines, and I come in and play horn solos. I play the
kicks with the band. It's a magical thing . . . and I got something else to
say; this record is starting to take me out of the blues scene. I hope so,
man, because when they talk about the blues, the whites think of
Mississippi and Chicago. Man, I can't stand that kind of stuff. I really
can't. (Obrecht 1997: 88)
724 Matt Backer
By the mid-1950s, the blues was reaching a wide audience, and crossing over
into the white populace. The term "blues" was becoming as diverse and all
encompassing as its cousin, jazz. Sub-classifications began to emerge, and
old style Delta players like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi John
Hurt began to be, as mentioned earlier, incorporated into the folk revival.
Gospel became a separate entity. One of the few people to continue in
the tradition of performing lay preachers was Elmore James, who believed
that the blues was the devil's music, and that he was firmly in the hands
of the prince of darkness when performing. Accordingly, he described his
guitar tone as "the gates of hell opening up" (James 1969). The author of
what is probably the best-known slide guitar phrase in the history of the
genre, he tuned his flat-top acoustic guitar to open D or open E, fitted a
magnetic pickup to it and put it through an amplifier set on "stun." The
aforementioned lick, which opens "Dust My Broom," consists of a fiery
sixteenth-note triplet double-stop consisting of the root and the domi-
nant, sliding down to the third and then to the root, all of the notes that
would be arrived at naturally by laying a slide across the twelfth fret of
a guitar using this tuning. The full band, augmented by a horn section
(on some recordings of this often re-recorded song) change on time, follow
all the rules and, as you would expect with an aggregation led by Beelzebub,
rock.
The guitar tended to feature less in straight gospel performances, provid-
ing a more supportive role in songs that were based on hymns and spirituals.
One exception was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was unusual in that she was
a solo female performer who played the electric guitar, by the fifties well
on its way to its current position as that most testosterone fueled of ins-
truments. Another influential player in that field was Clive "Pops" Staples,
paterfamilias of a group of girls with truly divine voices. His subtle use of
tremolo (an electronically produced modulation in volume), rhythmic ac-
cents and chord voicings would become a staple of the guitarist's vocabulary,
as evinced in the group's hit records in the late sixties and early seventies.
Other guitarists who would incorporate this styling would include Curtis
Mayfield and Jimi Hendrix.
By the later part of the 1950s, a number of small specialty labels emerged
from various regions, but none was as important to the dissemination of
the blues as Chess records in Chicago. Including all of the pre-eminent per-
formers of the era: Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon (who also
served as in-house songwriter, musical director, and A&R) , they were able to
take some of their artists to a wider audience when, as Muddy Waters put it,
the blues had a baby and named it rock'n'roll. While Elvis and Carl Perkins
and Bill Haley terrorized God-fearing people everywhere, imagine the effect
125 The guitar
provided by Bo Diddley, whose showmanship and tremolo-drenched guitar
playing was accompanied by maracas and a high- speed mambo that sounded
like an American's idea of jungle drums. The emulations of human speech
on "Mumblin' Guitar" would be studied and emulated by the aforemen-
tioned Hendrix, and the sexual innuendo of "Mona" and "Who Do You
Love" would be copied and redefined by The Doors and The Stones, among
countless others. In 1979, British punk super group The Clash would insist
on him as their support act on their debut American tour. But Chess had
an ace in the hole, a remarkably influential guitarist, singer and songwriter
who was also a powerful entertainer, and one of the few black performers
to cross over onto white radio and television.
It has often been suggested that had Chuck Berry been born white, he'd
have been bigger than Elvis. He might even have obviated the need for Elvis
and the Rolling Stones. His distinctive duck walk and rapid-fire double-
stop guitar phrases mesmerized audiences everywhere, and he was in the
tradition of crowd pleasers like Guitar Slim and T-Bone Walker. But he took
the traditions of the twelve-bar blues - apparent in down-tempo tunes like
"Wee Wee Hours" - to new lengths, wedding driving, blues based, up-tempo
stompers to knowing, witty, literate lyrics. Equally familiar with blues, jazz
and country, he told complete stories in three verses, accompanied by guitar
phrases that are inseparable from the song. The slid major-sixth chord which
heralds the opening of "Memphis, Tennessee" wedded with the Jimmy Reed
inspired rhythm track (faithfully duplicated in covers by, among others,
Lonnie Mack, and The Faces) evokes the story of lost love leading up to
the punch line "Marie is only six years old ..." The sixteenth-note triplet
augmented chord that starts "School Days" is as ugly as any alarm clock
can be at the crack of dawn. Each sung phrase is answered by a double-stop
down-stroke guitar phrase, ending in the chiming chorus "Hail, Hail Rock
and Roll" answered by a line evocative of a school bell at the end of a long
day. This call and response is rooted in the Delta tradition, but paints a
picture a world away: of bobby socks, blue jeans and burger joints that will
forever be innocent 1950s America. The fact that the author was a black
man in his thirties makes it all the more remarkable.
By the beginning of the sixties, the influence of the blues guitar was
all pervasive. Performers like Buddy Holly were taking the influence of
Bo Diddley to white audiences through songs like "Not Fade Away," and
California surfers found a soundtrack in guitar instrumentals like Dick
Dale's "Miserlou" and The Ventures' "Pipeline." Texan blues artist Freddie
King recorded an album of instrumentals and found himself with a crossover
hit. Signed to Chicago's King records, his recordings with a band of seasoned
professionals took the blues format a little bit further. "The Stumble" weds a
726 Matt Backer
memorable melody to a chord progression which departs from the standard
twelve-bar format - starting on the IV, returning to I on bar 3, up to IV on
bar 5, and then to V on bar 7, before arriving at a stop-time break in which a
diminished chord leads to a I-VI-II-V turnaround, a jazz staple. "Driving
Sideways" stays on I for four bars, reverting to V on bar 5. "Hideaway" is
more of a standard twelve-bar, but with added stop-time sections and time
changes to keep the listener interested. It was a huge hit in 1961, and found
another audience when John Mayall's Bluesbreakers covered it on their debut
record. Their guitarist, Eric Clapton, saw a photograph of King playing a
Gibson Les Paul, and decided that he had to have one too - although by
the time he finally obtained one, his hero had switched to a Gibson 345 like
his namesake, B. B. Despite using finger and thumb picks, his technique
owed little to people like Lightnin' Hopkins, being another player who was
inspired by the saxophone. "I play my guitar like Louis Jordan used to play
his horn," he said in an interview with Guitar Player magazine not long
before his death in 1976. "That's the same sound that I get" (F. King 1976).
The third of the Three Kings was Albert - like the other two, no relation.
A native of Mississippi, he achieved his biggest success in the sixties when he
recorded in Memphis for the legendary Stax label, home to such soul stars as
Otis Redding and Sam and Dave. The fusion of blues and soul was made in
heaven, with the peerless house band of Booker T. and the M. G.s (purveyors
of the classic "Green Onions") and the Memphis Horns providing a funky
foundation for King's razor-sharp tone and wide bends. These were achieved
by playing a conventionally strung guitar left handed, and not re-stringing,
as other left handers like Charlie Christian or Jimi Hendrix were wont to
do. Having the highest string at the top of the fretboard not only gives it a
great range, but pulling from above rather than pushing from below (the
most common string-bending technique) enables other strings to be bent
simultaneously, allowing for King's remarkable multi-timbral phrasing. His
choice of guitar - a Gibson Flying V - allowed unprecedented access to
the upper reaches of the fretboard, too. Eric Clapton brought him to the
attention of a wider audience in the sixties when Cream covered his classic
"Born Under A Bad Sign," and his influence on players like Jimi Hendrix,
Robert Cray, and Stevie Ray Vaughan is incalculable.
In Britain in the late fifties and early sixties, blues aficionados like Alexis
Korner and John Mayall would find a willing group of young acolytes who
may not have been aware of the rich cultural traditions of the music they
loved, but just loved the sound. Sonny Boy Williamson is reputed to have said
of the Yardbirds, his backing group on an early sixties U.K. tour, "They want
to playtheblues so bad. . . andtheydo!" but others, like Muddy Waters, John
Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley were more encouraging of their young European
127 The guitar
admirers. Upon arriving in America for the first time, the Rolling Stones
could not believe that their American idols were not household names -
after all, they had played to the same young audiences in Britain night
after night. When their American popularity ensured a spot on the popular
teenage show "Shindig," one of the Stones' provisos for appearing was that
Howlin' Wolf open the show. This provided a bemused wide American
television audience with their first exposure to their own legacy. To this day,
many Americans make a pilgrimage to Liverpool because they think it is the
birthplace of rock'n'roll.
It wasn't purely down to longhaired British art school students to educate
white America. In Chicago, middle-class white boys like Michael Bloomfield
and Paul Butterfield honed their skills on guitar and harmonica by watching,
and copying, artists like Buddy Guy and James Cotton perform in South
Side clubs. The Butterfield Blues Band would approach their subject with the
same missionary zeal as John MayaU's band in Britain, or Al Wilson's Canned
Heat in northern California. A pair of albino brothers must have been quite a
sight in Texas juke joints when Johnny and Edgar Winter popped in to listen
or play. Parts of the Butterfield Band would join Bob Dylan for his legendary
electrification, Canned Heat would be a huge hit at Woodstock, and Johnny
Winter would be the most expensive signing in the history of Columbia
Records in 1969. Blues - whether interpreted in the form of meandering
jams by the Grateful Dead in San Francisco, or loud riffs by the Earth Blues
Band in Birmingham (who would find greater success when they changed
their name to Black Sabbath) - had been subsumed into the mainstream.
As the seventies grew to a close, people began to get used to the idea of
rock stars being elder statesmen as their heroes stumbled out of drink or drug
rehabilitation programs. Some of them chose to use their lofty position to
thank some of the people who provided them with the cash flow that nearly
killed them. Johnny Winter produced Muddy Waters' "Hard Again," an
epochal return to the rawness of the fifties Chess recordings. Keith Richards
put together an all-star band to celebrate Chuck Berry's sixtieth birthday,
filmed as "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll" and Eric Clapton's blues nights at the
Albert Hall are almost as regular a part of the social calendar as the First
Night of the Proms. John Lee Hooker would have to wait until the nineties
for his much-deserved Grammies and all-star duets, but the blues would
never again be part of the mainstream.
Gospel became a marketing term, but the influence of earlier performers
like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Aretha Franklin became apparent in main-
stream successes like Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige. Out-and-out
gospel choirs like Sounds of Blackness would find a large and affluent black
audience, but the role of the guitar would be marginal.
128 Matt Backer
As Punk, New Romanticism, Hip-Hop and Dance infatuated the public,
a younger generation of blues guitarists would return to different eras in
the history of the music. Stevie Ray Vaughan would reacquaint his audi-
ence with the work of Guitar Slim, Buddy Guy and Albert King as well as
establishing Jimi Hendrix in the blues pantheon before joining it himself
courtesy of a helicopter crash. His brother Jimmie, a long-serving member
of The Fabulous Thunderbirds who kept alive the work of arcane artistes
like Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester, would play at the inauguration of presi-
dent George W. Bush. So too would fellow hirsute Texans Z. Z. Top, who
allegedly provided funds to turn the shack in which Muddy Waters was
born into a national monument. In America, there is a chain of restau-
rants and venues part owned by veteran rockers Aerosmith and comic
actor Dan Ackroyd called "The House of Blues," which combines an up-
market Planet Hollywood approach to soul food (the cuisine of the Deep
South) and decor which resembles a highly decorated rural shack. Perform-
ing at the New Orleans branch, located in the French Quarter, is a surreal
experience.
Others have persevered in a more low-key way. Johnny Winter has
recorded for blues labels like Alligator and Point Blank, and has been a
fixture on the blues circuit for over twenty years, abandoning the capes and
rhinestone suits of the seventies. Younger performers like Eric Bibb, Ben
Harper, Sonny Landreth, and Keb Mo' explore all areas of the blues, from
Delta-influenced musings to reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin's "Whole
Lotta Love." Olu Dara does what Taj Mahal has been doing for thirty years,
which is exploring roots and branches of the blues in African and Caribbean
music. Ry Cooder recorded with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, who in
turn has been assiduous in showing the world the African origins of the
blues.
There are a few survivors of the old days in the Mississippi Delta. Henry
"Mule" Townsend spent the early years of the twenty-first century touring
the U.S. and Europe - seventy-two years after making his first commercial
recordings. Along with Honeyboy Edwards, Homesick James, and Robert
Lockwood Jr. (who spent his early years playing with Robert Johnson), they
called themselves the Delta Blues Cartel and played as they always have.
At the other end of the spectrum, little-known Mississippi guitarist R. L.
Burnside found unlikely collaborators in the form of the Jon Spencer Blues
Explosion, who despite their name are New York post-punkers who mix
deconstructed riffs with break beats and samples. Their late nineties album,
A Ass Pocket of Whisky, led to Burnside recording with younger producers
who have worked with alternative rock acts like Beck and Liz Phair, who
utilize contemporary sounds and techniques. Unlike other anachronisms -
Muddy Waters' late sixties foray into psychedelia Electric Mud springs to
129 The guitar
mind - these recordings actually work. Burnside's I Wish I Was In Heaven
Sitting Down is one of the best albums of 2000, in any genre.
Whatever happens to the blues guitar, it is clear that we are at the end of
an era. As Robert Palmer says in an article on the Delta Blues Cartel, which
could easily apply to any of the old masters, they are "better understood as
deans of the old school who helped to author its code . . . when they pass, so
go the mysteries . . . and all the wisdom that lay within" (Palmer 2001: 48).
9 Keyboard techniques
ADRIAN YORK
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the itinerant pi-
anists working in the whorehouses, gambling dens, bars and lumber camps
of the American South played in a style known as barrelhouse. Blues, gospel
and boogie-woogie piano styles all emerged from barrelhouse and so to
understand the roots of these styles it is to the early days of barrelhouse that
we must turn. The "race" recording industry was not underway until the
1920s and so the only sources that we have for studying the pianists of the
pre-recording era are the occasional piano roll and the written and recorded
recollections of a younger generation of "piano professors." Therefore this
chapter can only recount a partial history, trying to draw together fragments
of a much deeper culture into something coherent. This I have done by exam-
ining the playing techniques that unite and separate these interwoven styles,
their genesis, transformation and cross-genre transplantation that has so in-
formed the development of popular music through the twentieth century.
The early rural and urban barrelhouses, juke joints and honky-tonks
were bars where entertainers sporting exotic-sounding stage names such as
Papa Lord God, No Leg Kenny and Drive 'Em Down would play on "honky-
tonk" sounding pianos. Some pianists only played barrelhouse blues in their
performances, others would combine blues with ragtime, popular songs
and classical pieces. These piano "crushers" or "pounders" had to make
themselves heard over the noise of the bar often at the expense of accuracy
and certainly without much in the way of formal technique. Combined with
the function of providing dance music, these conditions helped to form an
aesthetic that was quite unique. Barrelhouse was pianistically innovative in
the use of grace notes, a technique that uses the same finger to slip from the
note a semitone below to the intended note, three- or four-note glissandi
and one- or two-handed tremolandi as embellishments. It is very probable
that the barrelhouse pianists were trying to imitate similar effects used by
the early rural blues guitar players. Meter varied between a steady^, \ for
more up-tempo tunes, and \ for a two-step feel. Left-hand patterns could
be as minimal as a root note on beats 1 and 3 sometimes ornamented by
an ascending grace note or three- or four-note glissandi. The addition of a
fifth above the tonic points the way to the early boogie left hands.
The early barrelhouse feel was a simplified version of the ragtime left
[130] hand. The ragtime "boom-chick" consisted of a low register tonic or chord
131 Keyboard techniques
tone in octaves on beats 1 and 3 going to close-position triads voiced around
middle C on beats 2 and 4. The barrelhouse version could be as simple as
broken-octave quarter notes starting with the lower octave, often adding in
the fifth to the higher octave on beats 2 and 4. When this voicing is played
with a eighth-note feel, it again points the way ahead to boogie-woogie.
Another left-hand option was the walking bass where you move to adjacent
scale tones or chromatic passing notes in a four to the bar quarter-note
feel. 1 Eighth-note triplets or syncopated eighth-notes supplied rhythmic
momentum in the right hand. As with the early blues guitar players, the
harmony could be as straightforward as a tonic drone with the occasional
foray to chords IV and V or a blues turnaround. Chords would mainly be
majors and minors with their sevenths, major sixths, and the occasional
passing diminished chord. Chord voicings were much less full than those of
the ragtime pianists with the open fifths and fourths in the left hand creating
a hollow-sounding harmony. Soloing was generally restricted to decoration
around the vocals. The most common scales were the blues and myxolydian 2
which were often used simultaneously, allowing for the flattened and nat-
ural thirds to be used as adjacent notes and sometimes "crushed" together
creating a major/minor harmonic ambivalence. Although eight-, twelve -
and sixteen- bar blues forms were common, song structures reflected the
informal setting and players often threw in extra beats or bars.
One early development of barrelhouse was boogie-woogie, a repetitive
eight-to-the-bar left-hand pattern with both the rolling left-hand patterns
and right-hand effects being influenced by the sound of the railway. The
style was popular by the late 1890s for as Eubie Blake said about a pianist
named William Turk:
He had a left hand like God. He didn't even know what key he was
playing in, but he played them all. He would play ragtime stride bass, but
it would bother him because his stomach got in the way of his arm, so he
used a walking bass instead. I can remember when I was thirteen; this
was 1896, how Turk would play one note with his right hand and at the
same time four with his left. We called it "sixteen," they call it
"boogie-woogie" now.
Roy Carew, a New Orleans music fan, said in a telling assessment of the
early style: "I would say that boogie-woogie was the bad little boy of the rag
family that wouldn't study. I heard crude beginnings of it in the back streets
of New Orleans, in those early years following 1904, but they were really
back streets . . . such music never got played in the gilded palaces."
Previously known by a variety of names such as "dudlow joe," boogie-
woogie did not go under that name until 1929 with the release of Clarence
"Pine Top" Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie -Woogie." Initially the boogie left
732 Adrian York
hand was introduced several choruses into a performance as a way of giving
added rhythmic impetus. Whilst it is probable that the various bass lines
were linked with particular dance steps there is some speculation that some
of the bass lines may have originated in the vaudeville theatres as a way
of providing accompaniments to various novelty acts. The earliest-known
recording featuring boogie bass lines was Clay Custer's version of George
W. Thomas' "The Rocks" recorded in New York City in 1923. It starts with
a rolling swing-feel bass changing to a rolling straight 3 feel and straight
broken octaves in the left hand. The right hand part consists mainly of
arpeggiated flourishes and melodies in octaves that are rhythmically staid.
His younger brother Hersal's piano roll of "The Fives" from 1924 has a
pounding eighth-note right hand underpinned by straight eighth-note left-
hand broken octaves and a repetitive boogie eighth-note left hand going
from the chord root and fifth (played twice) to root and sixth and finally
root and flat sixth. The right hand also uses the idiosyncratic sixteenth-note
tremolandi that is part of the Texas piano sound. The ill-fated prodigy
Hersal, who died aged only twenty in 1926, also influenced later blues
pianists with tracks like the 1925 "Suitcase Blues" with its proto-shuffle
opening left hand, right-handed eighth-note triplet and sixteenth-note
thirds and octave tremolandi. Despite coming from a through-composed
formal composition, these are all elements that are still present in contem-
porary blues and rock'n'roll playing.
If the Texas influence was important in the development of boogie-
woogie, the state was also a home to some of the most idiosyncratic barrel-
house stylists. Robert Shaw's composition "The Ma Grinder" is a rhythmic
mix of ragtime, barrelhouse and blues, with an exaggerated use of grace notes
and glissandi, propelled along using the New Orleans habanera feel. A simi-
lar mix is present in the early sanctified singing and barrelhouse/rag/gospel
piano playing of "Blind" Arizona Dranes. Born c. 1905 she performed in
the Pentecostal and Holiness churches in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and
became the first well-known gospel piano player. She defined the essential
elements of the gospel piano style: the left hand plays the bass, the middle
register supports and harmonizes the melody and the upper end adds fills
and countermelodies. The harmony is straight from the Protestant hym-
nals, diatonic with diminished passing chords, but with an added blues
influence; the rhythm can be straight or swung with much use of syncopa-
tion. She recorded tracks for the Okeh label in Chicago such as "In That
Day" (1926), "I Shall Wear A Crown" (1928) and, prefiguring the u s feel
of the 1950s, the \ "He Is My Story." Her left hand plays octave eighth
notes with sixteenth-note syncopation in both hands. Her right hand plays
eighth-note triads in the middle register, pounding sixteenth-note patterns
133 Keyboard techniques
that sound like Jerry Lee Lewis, and offbeat sixteenth-note riffs. Dranes fills
between vocal lines with her version of the Texan right-hand tremolando,
coming in on the second sixteenth-note in the bar over a major triad.
Another successful Dallas gospel musician of this early period was
Washington Philips (1891-1938) who on his recordings accompanies his
heartfelt vocals with the "dulceola," a very rare keyboarded dulcimer. With
his left hand he plays either a simplified ragtime left hand or arpeggiates the
left hand while the right hand "plucks" swung syncopated sixteenth-note
lines, often moving from major triad to major sixths. The right hand doubles
the vocal melody and also fills in with chiming right-hand lines, either single
note, in sixths, or in octaves. The extraordinary sound made by Philips in
recordings such as "Mother's Last Word To Her Son" and "Denomination
Blues" is strongly reminiscent of the sound and tonality of kora music from
Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Gambia mixed up with a hillbilly feel and a blues
tinged vocal!
If Washington Philips created a sound fit for the ears of angels, Luther
Magby's recordings "Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit" and "Jesus is Getting
Us Ready For The Great Day," bring us closer to earth. Accompanied by a
syncopated and busy tambourine the wheezing sound of his two-manual
harmonium gives these energetic two steps great momentum. His left hand
sticks to tonic and dominant onbeats while the right hand breaks up the
diatonic triads into sixteenth-note responses to his gruff vocals.
The influence of the early barrelhouse and boogie styles was felt in New
Orleans where Jelly Roll Morton was codifying the early jazz style. From the
recordings Morton made for the Library of Congress in 1938 he brings to
life the playing styles of some of those early unrecorded pianists. The four
to the bar opening feel of Morton's version of Tony Jackson's "Michigan
Water Blues" begins with triads in both hands voiced tonic, fifth and flat
seventh on the first beat. The upper two notes then descend chromatically
over the four beats of the bar ending on tonic, third and fifth. The left
hand moves into more traditional territory with an octave walking bass that
turns into split octave eighth notes, and he then plays a series of tunes that
came from the "lower-class districts." The two versions of the twelve-bar
"Honky Tonk Blues" feature either the simplified rag or broken octaves
left hand. The eight-bar "Levee Man Blues" has an even more basic left
hand, four-in-the-bar tonic and dominant to tonic and submediant, perhaps
to reinforce the rural setting of the composition. In "New Orleans Blues"
and "Low Down Blues" Morton demonstrates how in New Orleans the
tango rhythm is fused with the blues. The accuracy of these performances
is uncertain, however there are clear variations between the different styles
that he presents and these recordings remain a tremendous resource for
734 Adrian York
the jazz and blues historian. In his own compositions and arrangements
Morton offers a more sophisticated take on the blues than some of his less-
schooled peers. His playing is more pianistic, harmonically adventurous and
uses more complex voicings whilst retaining many of the early barrelhouse
stylistic elements.
The success of the blues divas in the early 1920s created recording op-
portunities for the barrelhouse, boogie and early gospel pianists. It is these
recordings from the 1920s and 1930s that give us the first contemporary im-
pressions of the stomps, boogies and blues being played in the barrelhouses
and the city rent parties. Until this point the pianists would have learned
tunes from each other, adapting them with their own trademark riffs and
introductions, creating a shared localized repertoire that would have to be
mastered by any pianist trying to break into the local scene. A case in point is
the "Vicksburg Blues" which was developed around 1 922 by "Little Brother"
Eurreal Montgomery and various other pianists in the Vicksburg area. He
taught it to Lee "Porkchops" Green who subsequently taught it to Roosevelt
Sykes. In 1929 Sykes then proceeded to record it (as "44 Blues") as did Green
("Train Number Forty-four") and eventually "Little Brother" himself. Little
Brother's version has a slow half-note left-hand walking bass each note being
anticipated by chromatic glissandi whilst the right hand plays eighth-note
chordal patterns and supports and answers every vocal phrase with a fast
repetitive note that seems to merge with his adenoidal vocal. In Roosevelt
Sykes' version that answering phrase is pitched in a much lower register
and the whole performance feels as if it is teetering on the edge of rhythmic
collapse.
The tension between sacred and secular is a defining characteristic of
African American society but once we move away from the machinations
of church politics and examine the process of cultural exchange we see that
the relationship between gospel and blues piano is one of symbiosis and not
of conflict. It is in the music of Georgia-born Thomas A. Dorsey that we see
the clearest example of this process. Dorsey started off by playing blues and
barrelhouse at local rent parties eventually graduating to working with blues
diva Ma Rainey. Using the stage name Georgia Tom he formed a duo with
guitarist Tampa Red and in 1928 as "The Hokum Boys" they had a hit record
with the seminal hokum blues "Tight Like That." Dorsey's piano playing on
the hokum tracks is in a gently rocking barrelhouse style which he claimed
was effective for not annoying the neighbors at rent parties. After a religious
conversion in 1921 at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago he turned
to composing and performing gospel blues compositions, and by the early
1930s had given up secular music for good. Despite initial resistance, partly
due to his racy hokum background, Dorsey ended up as the revered father
figure of American gospel music having made a neat switch of careers as
135 Keyboard techniques
the blues industry hit bad times with the Depression of the 1930s. What
he achieved was not just the integration of his barrelhouse feel into newly
composed gospel/blues compositions, but the business and creative vision
to understand that his songs and style could be popular with the northern
churches. Until that point they had rejected the downhome southern style of
worship in favor of Western classical music. They were, however, forced to
respond to demand for this new gospel sound. His style became well known
as the "Dorsey Bounce" and his feel was fully formed by the time of his
1934 recordings "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again" and "Singing In
My Soul." The octave left hand emphasizes the tonic and dominant on beats
1 and 3 with eighth-note runs linking the chord changes while the right hand
supports the melody with syncopated triadic chords and embellishes with
high-register major pentatonic fills. It was of course another musician from
Georgia, Ray Charles, who in the 1950s reversed this process transforming
the gospel music of his childhood into secular r&b.
By the late 1920s we can see the development of barrelhouse into a
number of distinct stylistic and regional archetypes. St. Louis was a city with
a strong tradition of ragtime piano and the ragtime sense of restraint and
control was clearly present in the playing of pianists such as Wesley Wallace
and Henry Brown. They had a reputation for playing slow to mid-tempo
blues with Brown in particular using hollow sounding open fifth four-to-
the-bar figures in the left hand. However there is a danger of simplifying
the regional issue and not taking into the account the diversity of feels that
each pianist could play. Wallace impresses with his unusual I train boogie
"No. 29" and Brown shows the clear influence of the stride and jazz pianists
in "Twenty First St. Stomp." Also active during this period in St. Louis were
Sykes, who achieved fame in early 1940s Chicago with his rocking boogie
basslines and right-hand blues and boogie licks, and Peetie Wheatstraw
( b. William Bunch in 1 902) , who was born in Tennessee but moved to the East
St. Louis area. He was best known for the up-tempo "stomp." This approach
had moved beyond the drone bass parts of the earlier barrelhouse stylists
to either a straight four-in-the-bar feel, with the simplified ragtime bass or
basic boogie figurations, or a \ feel with a single-note bass lines on the first
and third quarter-note beats of the bar. His songs such as "Peetie Wheatstraw
Stomp" transplant the rural barrelhouse feel into an urban context.
The transition from barrelhouse to boogie-woogie can be traced in the
1925 recording of Charles "Cow Cow" Davenport's influential "Cow Cow
Blues." This piece features a pounding left-hand octave eighth-note bass line,
strong two-handed riffing, repetitive right-hand single-note or broken-triad
licks and a turnaround that is still heard in the playing of contemporary
New Orleans pianist Dr. John. "Cow Cow Blues" is one in a line of train
blues including the first great boogie masterpiece, Meade "Lux" Lewis' 1927
736 Adrian York
recording of "Honky Tonk Train Blues." Against a steady rocking triadic left
hand that shifts from the second inversion tonic to the subdominant first
inversion, Lewis pulls off a virtuosic series of riffs, single-note/ thirds/sixths
tremolandi, and runs off and against the beat that leave the barrelhouse
behind. In the following year Pinetop Smith, who was Lewis' and Albert
Amnions' flatmate, recorded the first boogie-woogie hit. "Pinetop's Boogie -
Woogie," the tune that gave the genre its name, features a rolling boogie
left hand, a catchy melody in thirds and sixths and the infamous "lick"
turnaround made famous by Ray Charles. 4
The boogie-woogie craze started in 1938 in New York when Chicago
pianists Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons teamed up with Kansas City-
born Pete Johnson for John Hammond's "Spirituals to Swing" concerts at
Carnegie Hall. Ammons provides a link to the r&b of the 1940s with his
1936 recording of his version of "Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie" which goes
under the title "Boogie-Woogie Stomp." The track features a rhythm section
and brass and is driven along by Ammons' "hucklebuck" left hand. 5 The
same left-hand pattern drives Pete Johnson and singer Joe Turner's 1938
"Roll 'Em Pete" but it is Johnson's almost continuous eighth-note right hand
in thirds, fourths and triads and the use of chromatic passing notes, which
anticipates later rock'n'roll styles. Chicagoan Jimmy Yancey is the final key
figure in the mid- 1930s resurgence of boogie-woogie. With his rolling triadic
left-hand patterns, his style was closer to that of the older generation of
barrelhouse pianists, his playing often being slower and more pensive than
that of his pupils Ammons and Lewis.
Despite the importance of Chicago as a location for the development
of boogie-woogie, it was a resident of Indianapolis who provides the link
between the rural and the urban Chicago blues style. Pianist/singer Leroy
Carr and his musical partner guitarist "Scrapper" Blackwell recorded exten-
sively for the Vocalion and Bluebird labels from the late 1920s until 1935.
They set a new standard of interplay between piano and guitar with Carr's
driving four-to-the-bar left hand providing a solid rhythmic bed for his
gentle, melancholic vocals and Blackwell's piercing single-note guitar lines.
Their biggest hit was their first version of Carr's "How Long-How Long
Blues," an eight-bar medium-tempo blues that hinges around Carr's open
fifth quarter-note left hand with the guitar and right-hand piano providing
the decoration. Although there is nothing innovative about the individ-
ual elements of their playing, Carr and Blackwell created a rhythmic and
structural template that greatly influenced the Chicago sound.
The differences between the blues and barrelhouse tradition during the
Depression years can be heard in the work of two Chicago players who were
both recording in the mid-1950s. On Eddie Miller's recordings from 1936
such as "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water" or "Whoopie" the left-hand parts
137 Keyboard techniques
are either stride or walking bass with boogie elements being restricted to
fills. However George Noble's style on tracks such as the 1935 recording
of "TB Blues" has both hands being boogie-based with the tempo being
slower, the articulation much heavier, a looser sense of metrical structure
and the left hand often playing a boogie-based drone throughout most of
the composition. The right hand either plays blues answering phrases in
octaves, single-note fills in the manner of "Vicksburg Blues," tremolandi or
triadic riffs with crushed thirds.
The best-known exponent of piano blues in Chicago in the 1940s was
Big Maceo Merriweather whose style became the model for the urban blues
pianists in the city. Originally born and raised near Atlanta, Georgia, once
in Chicago he teamed up with Thomas Dorsey's ex-guitarist Tampa Red
recording a succession of hard-driving duets such as their 1941 classic
"Worried Life Blues." This is a mid-tempo eight-bar blues typical of their
output with a heavy four in the bar feel. From the same session "Ramblin
Mind Blues" shows the influence of older players such as Little Brother
Montgomery and Roosevelt Sykes and the rocking boogie of "Can't You
Read" with its hard swinging broken-octave left hand predates the sound
of Ray Charles. The boogie-woogie element was key to Maceo's style and
having been born left-handed can have only given added strength to his
bass lines. In 1945, Maceo recorded the classic boogie-woogie "Chicago
Breakdown" which again featured a hard-swinging broken-octave left hand
as well as idiosyncratic right-hand diatonic chordal patterns and eighth-note
left-hand riffing. The strength and quality of his playing attracted several
students including Otis Spann and his cousin Johnny Jones, who integrated
Maceo's style into the larger units typical of the urban Chicago sound of the
1950s.
It was Muddy Waters who integrated the piano and harmonica into the
electric urban blues units saying, "Another change was the piano. If you
get the piano in there you get a full bed of background music ... I kept
that backbeat on the drums plus full action on the guitar and harmonica
and the piano in the back, then you've got a big sound." Waters occupies
a parallel position to that of Duke Ellington or Miles Davis in jazz, all
inspired bandleaders who developed their sound around key personnel in
their bands. Otis Spann grew up in a small town called Belzoni, Missouri,
where he had tuition from a local player called Friday Ford. After coming
to Chicago he became Waters' piano player waxing seminal tracks such
as "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "Got My Mojo Working" as well as
recording with other artists on the Chess label such as Little Walter ("Key
to the Highway") and Bo Diddley ("I'm A Man"). What Spann achieves
is a total integration with the guitars, harmonica and drums, embellishing
"I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" with fast repetitive high register seventh
138 Adrian York
voicings and, on "I Just Want To Make Love To You," taking over the role of
the guitars by providing the main riffs. Johnny Jones worked with Tampa
Red after Big Maceo's premature death and then went on to play in slide
guitarist Elmore James' band. He also recorded "Little Red Rooster" with
Howlin' Wolf and composed the blues classic "Big Town Playboy."
1930s Chicago was not only the city where the blues was becoming
urbanized, it was also the center of the burgeoning gospel scene. Thomas A.
Dorsey founded one of the first gospel choirs at Chicago's Pilgrim Baptist
Church in 1932. His protege Roberta Martin started her career playing the
piano for Dorsey's choir, eventually branching off to form her own Roberta
Martin Singers. Martin brought elements of a Western classical music sen-
sibility to gospel both through her piano playing, which is characterized by
both a lightness of touch and richness of tone, and her harmonic knowledge
through which she developed a series of chord substitutions and harmonic
cadences that are still part of the gospel sound today. For instance instead of
cadencing from a I chord to a V and then back to a I, Martin would start on
a I second inversion, then go through a VI 7 , II 7 , V 7 ending on the I. Martin
favored slow tempos with compound-time signatures such as g, g and ^
so developing the gospel waltz style of composer Lucie E. Campbell. Martin
placed her right-hand chords around the middle register of the piano often
anticipating each chord change by playing any new chord two eighth notes
before its actual entry followed by a move to the chord a fourth away return-
ing to the new chord on the downbeat. For the rest of the bar Martin would
often move her right hand to the higher register putting in fills in octaves,
broken octaves or thirds, which would act as a "response" to the "call" of her
downbeat. Endings would be slowed right down with right-hand arpeggios
going up the keyboard.
If Martin defined the harmonic structures of gospel it was another
Dorsey protege who added the rhythmic elements that energized the gospel
music of the big urban gospel choirs through the 1960s and 1970s. Singer
and pianist James Cleveland's piano playing is described by gospel scholar
Anthony Heilbut as being "sensational" with "strong, clanking chords, the
heavy pedal alternating with the limp, lyric right hand." His powerful sound
may have emerged from his enforced practice method. As he told Heilbut
"My folks being just plain, every day people, we couldn't afford a piano.
So I used to practice each night right there on the windowsill. I took those
wedges and crevices and made me black and white keys. And baby, I played
just like Roberta." When he became director of the radio choir at Bethlehem
Baptist Church in Detroit where the Rev. C. L. Franklin was pastor he took
the young Aretha Franklin under his wing coaching her in both piano and
vocals. Aretha's pure gospel piano playing and singing is at its purest on
recordings made in 1956 at her father's church when she was only fourteen
139 Keyboard techniques
years old. On tracks like "Never Grow Old" and "There Is A Fountain Filled
With Blood" we hear dramatic confirmation that Aretha's style was fully
formed by this time. She mostly plays with a slow rubato feel articulating
each chord change with a mid-register right-hand chord and octaves in the
left hand. At the end of every line she puts in a right-hand fill, often as-
cending spread inversions of the chord or major pentatonic octave lines.
Left-hand octave tremolandi or right-hand single repetitive notes that have
their roots in the blues support moments of tension. When Aretha chooses
to emphasize the rhythm she does it with a swung right-hand octave motive
on the tonic that takes us straight to her soul recordings for Atlantic in the
1970s.
Aretha is accompanied on these recordings by the Hammond organ,
which supports the harmony with mid-register chords without adding any
rhythmic interest. But it was many years earlier that the organ was introduced
to gospel music. In 1937 gospel diva Mahalia Jackson, yet another Dorsey
collaborator, had her pianist Estelle Allen use a church organ to accompany
her on two tracks, "Keep Me Every Day" and "God Shall Wipe All Tears
Away." Allen sticks to simple accompaniments that followed the chords
without adding any embellishments. It was two years later in 1939 that
composer and music publisher Kenneth Morris introduced the Hammond
organ and piano combination to gospel. If the organ played sustained chords
then the piano could be more rhythmic or vice versa; the organ could match
the vibrato of a choir whilst the piano had a driving attack to its sound.
Western art music organ techniques were integrated into the gospel sound
by Detroit musician Alfred Bolden who tried to establish the organ as a
solo instrument. Organist Billy Preston began his career playing for James
Cleveland's Gospel Chimes group alongside pianist Jessy Dixon. Preston
went on to become the top soul organist/keyboard player of the 1960s taking
his gospel styles and enriching the sound of the Beatles and other pop artists
before establishing a successful solo career. The piano/organ combination
went on to be the foundation of the gospel sound until the 1970s when the
synthesizer came into gospel and pop music production techniques became
the norm. The organ of choice was the Hammond B3 organ with Leslie
rotary speaker cabinets. The Leslie had a rotating horn on top of the main
speaker that could spin at different speeds providing a different level of
effect. The swirling sound of the Leslie added an emotional excitement to
the sound of the organ and it would be brought in and out to match the
mood of the music.
The movement of artists across the secular/sacred divide had been well
established by the 1 960s, but in 1 969 the cultural pendulum swung the other
way with a record being released that introduced a white pop sensibility
and the white pop market to the gospel choir format. Without the vocals
740 Adrian York
The Edwin Hawkins' Singers' recording of "Oh Happy Day" could be a
great piece of soul-inflected pop. The piano ripples rather than drives with
accents on the third and sixth eighth note of the bar opening the door for the
soul/pop piano work on Aretha Franklin's "Say A Little Prayer" and the feel
and sound of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord." From this point on the
crossover between the gospel and r&b/pop sounds has become less distinct.
Gospel-influenced artists such as Andrae Crouch, The Winans, The Sounds
of Blackness and Destiny's Child have either crossed over completely or
else present a gospel/lite message with the production values reflecting the
commercial imperatives of the day.
Both gospel and blues piano and keyboard styles have influenced artists
working in many other genres. Big band swing artists such as Count Basie as
well as pop singers such as the Andrews Sisters jumped on the boogie-woogie
fad. The Louis Jordan "jump" sound of the 1 940s and r&b of the 1 940s, 1 950s
and 1 960s were based on the boogie-woogie feel with added blues and swing
elements. Jazz musicians in the 1950s and early 1960s revisited their blues
and gospel roots in compositions such as Horace Silver's "The Preacher."
Ray Charles, the first great soul star, integrated the cocktail blues ballad
style of Charles Brown with the gospel and boogie-woogie sounds of his
childhood in Georgia. In 1951, the blues and boogie right-hand figurations
of Ike Turner enlivened the proto rock'n'roll of Jackie Brenston's "Rocket
88," creating a model for Johnnie Johnson's playing with Chuck Berry later
that decade. In New Orleans, a distinctive regional piano style developed
with its roots in Jelly Roll Morton's "Spanish tinge," barrelhouse and boogie-
woogie. Pianists such as Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, James Booker
and Dr. John created an easily identifiable sound that expressed the "good
times" feel of the city. In England, Graham Bond introduced the Hammond
organ into pop music paving the way for its use in progressive and hard
rock and in piano and organ combinations in groups as diverse as Bruce
Springsteen's E Street Band and Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
The journey from the barrelhouse to the digital locations where much
contemporary music is made encompasses an intriguing history of racism,
poverty, social progression, technological development, religion, and the
music business. Despite these elements it is these pianists and their creativity
that have helped to create the diversity of popular music culture in the
twentieth century.
1 0 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
GUIDO VAN RIJN
Both blues and gospel are strongly formulaic in many respects. One area
in which songs demonstrate the degree of originality necessary for them
to become memorable to a particular audience is in the types of images
to be found in their lyrics. This chapter is not therefore concerned with
the description of everyday events, or the way narratives are created, 1 but
with the use of the imagination to render the commonplace in some way
extraordinary.
Blues and gospel music belong to the oral tradition. Access to these lyrics
can, therefore, be highly problematic. Record transcriptions present a great
many difficulties both because of the condition of the often very rare records
and the highly idiomatic articulation often employed. Early folklorists and
publishers printed many lyrics from songs that were sung to them. The
pioneer of recorded blues lyric analysis is Paul Oliver, but his 1960 Meaning
in the Blues and his 1968 Screening the Blues contain only isolated stanzas.
The same holds good for Samuel Charters in his 1970 The Poetry of the Blues.
Paul Garon's surrealistic approach to blues lyricism in his 1975 Blues and
the Poetic Spirit, while a controversial but stimulating effort, does not lay
the groundwork for a comprehensive study.
To analyze the use of imagery in blues and gospel songs an accurate writ-
ten corpus with complete transcriptions is required. In 1969 Eric Sackheim
published his The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly
to Muddy Waters. At the time this was a breakthrough publication and
although the (complete) transcriptions in it are more than adequate, there
are many lines in italics, which indicate phrases Sackheim could not hear.
In 1983 Michael Taft published Blues Lyric Poetry, a computer-generated
anthology of 2,000 (complete) lyrics. However, the expensive publication
contained so many inaccuracies in its transcriptions that it has never been
a really useful tool.
An audacious attempt to transcribe the pre-war lyrics is now being made
by R. R. Macleod in his series on the Yazoo, Blues Document and Document
reissue labels. The early Yazoo volumes are notoriously inaccurate, but
when Richard Metson, Bernard Holland and later John Newman joined the
author, the accuracy of the transcriptions improved greatly. At the moment
of writing Macleod has reached DOCD 5280 and a prospective table suggests
[ 141 ] that, from the frequency with which the books are appearing, he should have
742 Guido van Rijn
reached the end of the Document Series by 2010. Next the enormous task of
all the subsidiary and competitive labels will have to be accomplished and
then we begin on the thousands of unissued and unreissued pre-war record-
ings that are among the c. 20,000 songs listed in the standard discography
by Dixon, Godrich, and Rye. The massive number of post-war recordings
has not received any systematic transcription approach at all so far.
A comprehensive approach to the use of imagery in blues and gospel lyrics
is therefore currently impossible because of the paucity of accurate lyric
transcriptions available. However, a first exploration of a possible frame-
work and the fruits that may be picked from a systematic approach are
possible within the limitations of this chapter. The results of this limited
survey are nonetheless highly likely to be replicated as a greater number of
transcriptions become available.
As a framework I have borrowed the system so successfully employed
by Caroline Spurgeon in her classic 1935 study Shakespeare's Imagery and
What It Tells Us. She used the term "image" to connote "any and every
imaginative picture or other experience, drawn in every kind of way, which
may have come to the poet, not only through any of his senses, but through
his mind and emotions as well, and which he uses, in the forms of simile
and metaphor in their widest sense, for purposes of analogy." 2 In one of
the charts at the back of her book Spurgeon divides imagery into eight cat-
egories and a large number of sub-divisions. After a painstaking counting
of the range and subjects of the images in Shakespeare's plays the resultant
chart shows, for example, that Shakespeare employs no fewer than 245 im-
ages from "sports & games." After an analysis of them the writer concludes
that Shakespeare must have been very interested in sports himself and that
his favorite games may have been tennis, football, fencing, tilting, wrestling,
and especially bowls. This could therefore be a way to learn more about fre-
quently recorded blues and gospel singers as well. In another chart Spurgeon
compares Shakespeare's use of imagery to that of his contemporary drama-
tists and concludes, again as an example, that Shakespeare, Marlowe and
Massinger use no images from "town life" at all, whereas Jonson, Chapman
and Dekker do. In this way we might also compare, say Lightnin' Hopkins
and John Lee Hooker, both artists with an enormous recorded output.
Other approaches are also possible. In his 1951 The Development of
Shakespeare's Imagery, Wolfgang Clemen analyzed the development of
Shakespeare's imagery as seen against the background of the growth of his
dramatic art. In this way blues scholars could compare the early period
of, say, Big Bill Broonzy with the mature artist. However, in this chapter,
I loosely follow the Spurgeon classification of images to try to achieve a
more or less systematic survey of the imagery employed by a range of blues
and gospel artists. Only isolated stanzas will be used in this essay. The
143 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
reader is referred to the sources {Roosevelt's Blues, the Agram sleeve notes
and the later (and more accurate) volumes of R. R. MacLeod's Document
Blues) for the complete lyrics. Only by studying the complete lyric will the
suggestions made for the interpretations of the imagery become fully clear.
When no suggestion for an interpretation is made I hold the imagery to
be self-evident. It is not easy to bring gospel fully into the picture, owing to
the greater scarcity of accurate gospel transcriptions. These are represented
where possible, while further reference is made in the conclusion.
Nature
A surprising number of images have been derived from "nature," suggesting
that artists had been in close contact with it. Plant life provides an impor-
tant category. Katherine Baker uses the constancy of nature to stress her
determination in "Mistreated Blues":
Just as sure as the leaf grows on the tree,
I'm goin' to treat you mean, just like you treat me. 3
Luella Miller compares the fate of the mistreated woman to the "weepin'
willow" in her "Dreaming Of You Blues":
Oh, you weepin' willow grows in the swampy land,
That's the way with a sad woman when she's got a triflin' man. 4
In his 1 93 1 "Starvation Blues," Arkansas-born guitarist Charley Jordan sings:
The grass is all dying, the rivers all dripping low,
Do you know what is the matter? Starvation is at my door. 5
Jordan describes Nature itself on the brink of death. Just as the artist has
no food and drink, nature is no longer nourished by the rain. Jordan was
one of the premier commentators on the hardships of the Depression. In
the midst of a crisis in the recording industry Jordan kept making records.
Alice Moore compares "grass" to pubic hair twice, first in "Grass Cutter
Blues," next in "Telephone Blues":
And I woke up this morning, and the rain was falling fast,
And I began to wish that, I had some good man to cut my grass. 6
I tried to satisfy my man, and I nearly broke my back,
Now he's gone around here, pickin' this wild old grass. 7
In "Smiling Rose Blues" Luella Miller pictures the "street girl" as a "smiling
rose" who does not show the hardship that she is living in:
144 Guido van Rijn
You see them smilin' and lookin' like a rose,
The troubles that they have, there's nobody knows. 8
Images from the weather and the elements are also found. On October 2,
1941, Rev. J. M. Gates from Atlanta, Georgia, preached a remarkable sermon
for the R.C.A. microphones entitled "Hitler and Hell":
I can't help thinkin' about Hell: "Hitler and Hell,"
They tell me that he's a man who lives in a storm. 9
Gates here aptly describes the hell of the Second World War that caused
the deaths and ruination of millions of innocent people. Like a storm that
wreaks havoc on the land, Hitler ruins the world.
Like many of her fellow blues singers Lizzie Washington compares the
blues to "showers of rain" in "Mexico Blues":
When your troubles come, they pour just like the showers of rain,
But your worst trouble come when your man get a new jane. 10
The blues also come down like showers of rain in Tampa Red's "Stormy Sea
Blues":
Rainin on the ocean, stormin' on the sea,
Blues and that shower is showering down on me. 11
The imagery in the Edgewater Crows' "No Bonus Blues" of 1936 (Edgewater
is situated on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama) is of fire rather than water:
Bonus money like fire, and it sure will burn your hand,
I didn't get me no bonus, but I'm gonna spend some other man's. 12
In January 1936 the American Congress had finally decided to make bonus
payments to the World War I veterans. In the Depression this was a rare
windfall. For poor people who have suddenly received a substantial amount
of money the bonus is certainly like fire that will burn your hand. The bonus
money taught many veterans who their real friends were and the unknown
vocalist of the Edgewater Crows showed some nasty intentions.
Other nature images originate in the seasons and, close to the land as so
many of these singers were, farming. Spring is a time to make a fresh start.
Scrapper Blackwell has put up with his woman in the wintertime, but now
he has the "Springtime Blues":
It's springtime now, the summer's gonna come,
I've stood your jive all winter, now I've got some other one. 13
Josh White (born in South Carolina) refers to the farming of cotton in his
1933 recording of "Low Cotton":
145 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
When you're pickin' low cotton, you gotta get down on your bended knees,
Wonder who plant this low cotton, that gave me such a dirty deal. 14
On the surface, this of course means that the cotton plants are growing low,
so that you have to get on bended knees to pick them. However, there is
a double meaning to White's "low cotton." At the time prices for cotton
were dramatically low because of overproduction and thus the low growing
plants become symbolic of the low prices.
Katherine Baker describes her sexual attractiveness and availability
through some apt farmyard imagery in "Wild Women Blues":
Apples in my orchard, peaches on my shelf,
I'm getting tired of bein' all by myself. 15
Finally, imagery from celestial bodies does occasionally turn up. Walter
Davis had to move back in the woods because his woman gave him so much
trouble. Now he falls back on mother nature to comfort him in "Moonlight
Is My Spread":
The blue sky is my blanket, and the moonlight is my spread,
The rock is my pillow, that is where I rest my head. 16
Animals
In farmland communities, one might expect images of birds, domestic ani-
mals, and reptiles, and these appear in abundance. "Birds" occur in a typical
Depression blues, Charlie Spand's 1931 "Hard Time Blues":
Well, the time is so hard, the birds refuse to sing,
And no matter how I try, I can't get a doggone thing. 17
Nature itself is upset and as troubles never come alone Charlie also experi-
ences some serious woman trouble because he cannot get a job:
Lord, my woman is hard to get along with, as a sitting hen,
And she ain't cooked me a square meal, honey, in God knows when. 18
The marvelous image of the unapproachable woman as "a sitting hen" could
only occur to someone who has grown up on a farm.
Mississippi guitarist "Big" Joe Williams very often employed stanzas
about "a rooster and a hen." Here are two examples; the first one is from his
strangely titled 1935 recording of "Providence Help the Poor People":
Well, the rooster told the hen, said: "Hen, go lay,"
She told him: "No, the provident gived me place to stay."
146 Guido van Rijn
She told him "No," she don't have to lay no more,
Well, well, it may be tomorrow, ooh, Lord, I won't be back no more. 19
In spite of the odd title "Big" Joe was referring to the provident/charity orga-
nizations that supplied food and shelter. The record company misspelled it
as "providence." The hen refuses the rooster's command to "go lay," because
she is no longer dependent on him. Thanks to the provident the woman now
has a place to stay and she sees Poor Joe as a moocher. A second example of
Williams' rooster/hen imagery is to be found in the 1945 "His Spirit Lives
On," sung on the occasion of ED.R.'s death:
Well, now the rooster told the hen: "I wants to go crow,"
Said: "Now president Roosevelt is gone, can't live in this shack no more." 20
Williams sees Roosevelt's death as such a shocking event that even the animal
kingdom is moved. Here he may express the fear that he will even lose his
home now that his beloved president is no longer there to take care of him.
Two more "birds" are employed in Louisiana-born Leadbelly's 1940 "Red
Cross Sto":
She says: "Old cow died in the middle of the branch,
Jaybird whistled and the buzzard danced." 21
Excited about the large amount of carrion the "jaybird" whistles and the
"buzzard" dances. The old "cow" has drowned, but in death her floating
body provides food for the living. At first sight this stanza seems unrelated
to a song about the Red Cross store, as does the following stanza from the
same song:
She said: "A toad frog jumped at the bottom of the well,
And this poor boy, God, he done jumped in hell." 22
Another dying animal, this time a "toad frog" who jumped to its death. As
this song has its origin in the circumstances surrounding the draft for the
First World War and as it was sung when the United States was preparing for
the first-ever peacetime draft, it is perhaps possible to identify both stanzas
as metaphors for the horrors of the battlefield.
After Pearl Harbor had been bombed on December 7, 1941, many blues
lyrics contained anti- Japanese sentiment. "Doctor" Clayton was outraged
in his "Pearl Harbor Blues":
The Japanese is so ungrateful, just like a stray dog on the street,
Well, he'll bite the hand that feeds him, soon as he gets enough to eat. 23
Adolf Hitler is compared to another wild animal when he stretches out his
"paw" in "Pearl Harbor - Parts 1&2" by the Soul Stirrers from 1947:
147 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
Old Hitler from Berlin stretched out his paw,
Brought the European countries into war. 24
Only a close observer of farm animals could evoke a powerful image of a
"billy goat" such as Georgia-born Barbecue Bob (aka Robert Hicks) uses
after the 1929 elections in his 1930 "We Sure Got Hard Times":
Just before lection, you was talkin' how you was goin' to vote,
And after election was over, your head down like a billy goat. 25
Evidently Bob's girlfriend had not voted for Herbert Hoover, the person-
ification of the Depression to the blues and gospel singers, and not only
to them. To the men born on the farm the image of the eating goats and
hogs had become synonymous with dejection. When Rev. R. H. Taylor (who
was recorded in Hattiesburg, Mississippi) recorded his 1936 sermon "The
Bonus Have Found the Stingy Mens Out" [sic] he scolded the veterans who
had spent their bonus too soon by comparing them to hogs in the same
characteristic position:
Don't call my husband a hog!
Oh yes, he's hog! Or remind me of a hog. Under the acorn tree with his head
down.
Gruntin' and eatin', never look up to see where it's coming from.
I wouldn't say that!
Possibly a limb would fall and break his neck. That's the way these bonus
mens are.
Amen!
They are with the head down, enjoying their blessings,
Don't never look up to thank God for nothing he has done to 'em. 26
Other animals familiar to such singers include squirrels, horses, and dogs.
Here are two songs in which squirrel imagery occurs. The first one is
Leadbelly's 1942 "Mr Hitler":
He says if God rules heaven, he's gonna rule the world,
But the American people say he will be shot down just like a squirrel. 27
Squirrels are no farmers' friends. Out in the country Leadbelly must have
seen squirrels being shot from the trees. In this song he predicts that Adolf
Hitler will be killed off in a similar manner. The second song in which a
squirrel is used as an image is Sonny Boy Williamson's 1944 "Check up
on My Baby." In this song an imaginary conversation takes place between
Hitler and Roosevelt. The former brags that he has "the fastest airplanes
in the world." The latter retorts that his airplane can climb in the sky as
speedy as a squirrel can climb a tree: We got a airplane that's built up like a
squirrel. 28
148 Guido van Rijn
In "You Know That Ain't Right," Edith Johnson describes her lover's fancy
woman as a "young colt," a term used for a debutant lover, who, confusingly
in this context, is of the male sex:
I pay rent, keeping food on the table,
When I come home, he got a young colt in my stable. 29
In "Telephone Blues," Alice Moore discards of her unfaithful lover in a drastic
way:
And he made me love him, now he's trying to throw me down,
So I got a shotgun, hit him just like he was a hound. 30
And in "Doggin' Man Blues" she again refers to the cruel ways that "dogs"
are often treated by human beings:
My man, he mistreated me, he treated me like a dog,
But that lovin' he's got, made me fall just like a log. 31
This sympathy for the poor "dog" is also expressed in Mary Johnson's
"Muddy Creek Blues":
I'd rather be in the muddy creek, floating like a log,
Than to be in St. Louis, treated like a poor watchdog. 32
At the end of Doctor Clayton's "Pearl Harbor Blues," he sings that the U.S.
sold brass and scrap iron to the Japanese, which they had now turned into
treacherous bombs. Just like the ungrateful stray dog with its full belly the
Japanese "bites the hand that feeds him." Only a neglected "stray dog" will
act so unnaturally, even a "rattlesnake" will warn you before it attacks. Not
so the Japanese:
Some say the Japanese is hard fighters, but any dummy ought to know,
Even a rattlesnake won't bite you in your back, he will warn you before he
strikes his blow. 33
Mary Johnson's "Muddy Creek Blues" contains an ominous meeting with a
personified "tadpole":
I went to the muddy creek this morning, with my razor swinging in my
hand,
I said: "Good morning, Mr. Tadpole, have you seen anything of my man?"
The tadpole vowed to me, before I raised my hand:
"I'm telling you, dear lady, I'm not keeping up with your man."
"Muddy Creek Blues" ends with an unveiled threat emphasized by a blood
red "wine" image:
I say I'm black and evil, you sure don't know my mind,
I'll cut your throat, Mr. Tadpole, drink your blood like cherry wine. 34
149 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
Mary Johnson presents the "snake," which is often used as a phallic symbol,
as a despicable, untrustworthy animal in "Rattlesnake Blues":
You treats me like a rattlesnake, crawlin' on the ground,
The better I try to treat you, the more you throw your mama down. 35
In "Rattle Snake Groan," Luella Miller has the same opinion of a
"rattlesnake," but in her case the mistreating lover is an even more severe
case. In which the "boa constrictor" is called for:
Rattlesnake, rattlesnake, what make you worry me so?
I know that you are dangerous when you crawl at the front of my door.
Must been a boa-constrictor, rattlesnakes don't bit so hard,
And I know that he was dangerous, when he crawled up in my yard. 36
Even insects and fish are employed for their apparently innate qualities. In
"Spider Blues," Will Weldon imagines he is the spider that has cast his web
to catch lovely females:
Yes, I'm that spider, I build my web all over town,
Yes, I'm gonna catch a butterfly, hoo, well, if she keep on hangin' around. 37
In "I'm Going Fishing Too," Alice Moore uses an image from fishing to
explain that she is ready for love, and that her sexual appetite is quite diverse:
I believe I'll go fishing, at catfish, snipe or trout,
There's some good fishes in my lake, all they need is pulling out. 38
Very few images from "town life" are used, instead nature and the animals
that are part of it are responsible for the majority of all the images used. Most
of these artists had moved to the big cities (St. Louis, Memphis, Chicago and
New York) at the time of recording but in order to respond to the experiences
of their listeners, they did not forsake their country roots when they were
inventing their poetic images.
Food
In a society where the tribulations of everyday existence were ever-present,
focus on such a basic commodity as food is unsurprising. What is notable
is the end to which such imagery is put. In "Red Cross Sto," Leadbelly tells
the story of a man and a woman, the latter being described as follows:
She was a good-looking woman, she had great big legs,
She walks like she walkin' on a soft-boiled egg. 39
The "soft-boiled egg" is a fine food image that pictures a well-built woman
as she walks. The song continues:
150 Guido van Rijn
She come down here and she bowed down on her knees,
I said: "You better look somewhere for your butter and cheese." 40
She tries to persuade her husband to enlist in the army so that he will be
able to support her with a bonus payment. The man obviously does not feel
like it because the life of a soldier is too dangerous, and refuses to be her
meal ticket. The phrase "butter and cheese" may also have sexual overtones.
Leadbelly later explained that the story was based on a real event. The woman
had left her husband and was now pleading to him in regret. The man does
not want to provide for her anymore, either financially, or sexually.
Food images in the blues are notorious for their sexual overtones. Thus
"butter" and "cheese" are often used as images for sperm. Sometimes the
food/sex imagery develops into a sustained metaphor as in Louis Jordan's
1942 "Ration Blues":
Baby, baby, baby, what's wrong with Uncle Sam,
He's cut down on my sugar, now he's messin' with my ham.
I gotta cut down on my jelly, it takes sugar to make it sweet,
I'm gonna steal all of your jelly, baby, and rob you of your meat.
They reduced my meat and sugar, and rubber's disappearin' fast,
You can't ride no more with papa, 'cause Uncle Sam wants my gas. 41
All the rationed goods mentioned in this hilarious song are images of a sexual
nature. Thus "sugar" may stand for semen, both "ham" and "jelly" for the
vagina, "meat" is sexually attractive female flesh, "rubber" is a condom, the
"car ride" refers to sexual intercourse and "gas" might refer to semen again.
Another example of the use of "meat" with a sexual connotation is to be
found in Sonny Scott's 1933 "Red Cross Blues No. 2":
I saw two women, they was arguing on the street,
They was talking about that Red Cross meat. 42
As the rest of the lyrics make clear they may have something going with the
head clerk of the Red Cross Store, who is identified as sexually attractive by
the image "Red Cross meat."
A food image, for once without a sexual connotation (I think!), is the
use of "kraut" in the 1936 song "Bonus Men" by Earl Thomas:
Boys, I wonder what that girl's gonna do, when the bonus men's money play
out,
She'll be standing there round Black Avenue, looking like a barrel of kraut. 43
An original image if ever there was one! It is hard to imagine, but we can be
sure that the unfortunate girl will not have appeared to her best advantage
in these destitute circumstances.
151 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
For women singers, food also serves as an effective and frequently used
sexual image. "Nickles Worth Of Liver Blues" by Edith Johnson presents
"(bird) liver," "stew" and "grease" all as images of female genitalia:
Bring me a nickel's worth of liver, dime's worth of stew,
Feed everybody on Lucas Avenue.
Bring me a nickel's worthy of liver, dime's worth of grease,
Whipped my man, he called all the police.
When you see me worried, I'm thinkin' 'bout my bird liver,
I'll kill you 'bout him, and my hand won't even quiver. 44
When Edith sings "Honey Dripper Blues" she uses an unabashed food image
that she no doubt learned from her accompanist Roosevelt Sykes, who
was known as "The Honey Dripper" on his numerous Decca and OKeh
recordings.
Ah, he treats me mean, only comes to see me sometimes,
But the way he spreads his honey, Lord, it makes me think I'll lose my
mind. 45
In "Soothing Syrup Blues," a post-war recording, Edith used another sweet
delicacy to describe a tender love encounter:
If your baby twist and turn, won't let you sleep at night,
All he wants is a little more syrup, then wants you to hold him real tight 46
These images show the persistent pleasure derived by blues artists from the
use of food/sex symbolism.
Everyday existence
As is to be expected there are more domestic images to be found in female
lyrics than in male ones. Key groups focus on images from around the house,
on sickness and death, and on adornment.
In "Ain't No More To Be Said," Edith Johnson advises her lover how to
keep her "stove" red hot:
I just need plenty of coal, to keep my good stove cherry red,
And if you keep the ashes shook down, Lord, there ain't no more to be
said. 47
Lizzie Washington feels the same need and wants her lover to use his most
efficient tool in "Skeleton Key Blues":
Papa, they tell me you's a key man and keep plenty of keys in stock,
It takes your long skeleton key to keep my soul unlocked. 48
152 Guido van Rijn
Luella Miller's love in "Wee Wee Daddy Blues" is readily available at every
possible moment:
I've got love like a hydrant, I turns it on and off,
If you want me to steal, I swear your soul be lost. 49
There are of course a great many images of "Death." One of them was
encountered above when "Starvation" was knocking at doors. Another, very
interesting one, is to be found in Jack Kelly's 1933 "President Blues":
I believe, I believe, President he's alright,
He kept me from goin', I say, to the Last Big Fight. 50
For years this final image was misunderstood by all the blues experts who
heard the record. An amazing number of suggestions for its transcription
was offered. "The last big fight" surely must be "Death" itself. Here life is
seen as a series of fights and the artist is saved from the final fight by the
inspiration he received from Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Luella Miller in "Tombstone Blues" a faithful lover is so essential in
life that she would rather be dead if he mistreated her:
If the tombstone was my pillow, and cold clay was my bed,
If my daddy continue mistreat me, I would just as soon be dead. 51
Many diseases are mentioned in the blues, tuberculosis being one of the
most prominent, as in George Noble's "T. B. Blues":
Mmm, T. B. is killin' me,
Like a man when he's in prison, always wish he were free. 52
One of the most inventive images is used by Alice Moore when she applies
"jewel" imagery in "Blue Black And Evil Blues" to describe the clitoris and
"the pearl diver" as a marathon performer, by analogy with the diver's
ability to hold his breath and plumb the depths.
Yes, my man is a pearl diver, and his stroking can't go wrong,
And he puts it on the bottom, and all the breath's so doggone long. 53
A variety of images relate to other aspects of daily life. One of the best-
known blues images from the world of sports is the "jockey," here employed
by Elizabeth Washington in her "Riot Call Blues":
My man, he a jockey and he taught the little girl just how to ride,
He said, when it gets tough in the middle, that he'd try it on the doggone
side. 54
Professions also appear. One that may come in handy in a love scene is used
in Alice Moore's "Push Cart Pusher":
153 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
He pushes all day long, then he come in and push at night,
I like my push cart pusher, 'cause he pushes them up for me. 55
Money, of course, features prominently. As early as 1933 Memphis blues
artist Jack Kelly sang the very first blues song about the new incumbent of
the White House:
I was walkin' around in Memphis, until my foots got thin as a dime,
Don't be for President Roosevelt, I would have done a penitentiary crime. 56
The thin dime, the American 10-cent coin, provides a wonderful image for
the hungry vagrant, who was only kept from stealing food by his faith in the
new President:
Everybody cryin': "depression," I just found out what it means,
It means a man ain't got no money, he can't find no big money tree. 57
In the middle of the Depression the "money tree" is here used as a symbol
for the non-existent source of income.
The itinerant lives of so many singers at different times give rise to
imagery concerning travel, particularly concerning the automobile. In Edith
Johnson's "Ain't No More To Be Said," "gas" stands for sexual energy or
semen. The stanza describes male sexual appetite. Many female blues lament
the speed that, it is claimed, often characterizes male love-making:
A man is like a brand new car, always filled up with gas,
Ah, they're willing to take any kind of road, Lord, and they'll take 'em down
real fast. 58
A fine example of car imagery is to be found in Lizzie Washington's "Sport
Model Mamma Blues." The "puncture" image is used as a symbol for
penetration.
I'm a sport model mamma, I'm out on the floor for sale,
I speed with my tail light on so you can get on my trail.
I'm just a plain little Ford, I have puncture every day,
You may own a limousine, but they punctures the same old way. 59
Learning and the arts
Images from these realms are extremely rare. Education for black people
in the southern states was virtually non-existent at the beginning of the
twentieth century. The only exception was the black preacher who was
usually at least literate and had acquired some learning through his studies
of the Authorized King James version of the Bible. An exceptional example
154 Guido van Rijn
of imagery from this category is to be found in the 1 94 1 sermon "Hitler and
Hell" by Rev. J. M. Gates:
You is a standin' library for your peoples in Germany,
You is a walkin' and talking encyclopaedia for your peoples in Germany. 60
These remarkable images of a "library" and an "encyclopaedia" show Adolf
Hitler as the totalitarian leader who is the only source of approved ideas for
his people.
In "My Low Down Brown" by Lizzie Washington, a scientific image is
used in praise of a good lover:
My baby's long, my baby's tall, built just like a radio line,
He keeps a good wavelength, I can tune in all the time. 61
There are few images from the arts, as there are few from the sciences: a
lack of formal education must be the main reason for this absence, although
there is one clever use of a "musical instrument." In "You Ain't No Good
Blues" Edith Johnson puns on the "organ" as a "musical instrument" and a
"sexual organ":
Oh, when you get a good woman, why don't you treat her right?
'Cause I flock at that old organ, play it morning, noon and night. 62
Personifications
The final group of images take the form of "personifications." A personi-
fication is "a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstract ideas
are endowed with human qualities or actions." 63 The two animal personi-
fications, "the hen" and "the rooster," we have already discussed. There are
also, of course, a great many personifications of "Death." One of them was
encountered above when "Starvation" was knocking at doors.
Another omnipresent subject for personification is "Evil." A fine example
is to be found in the sermon quoted twice already: "Hitler and Hell" by Rev.
J. M. Gates from 1941:
I'm thinkin' now of innocent children and women dyin' all over the land
and country,
As you come crushin' through like the Demon of Hell on Earth. 64
Adolf Hitler as the "Demon of Hell on Earth" who "comes crushin' through,"
drives the message home and must have had a far greater impact than the
simple use of the personification "Devil."
To provide work for the unemployed during the Depression Roosevelt
launched many so-called "alphabetical agencies," employment programs
155 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
known by their abbreviations. These programs were often such a profound
influence in the lives of the blues singer and his audience, that they were
experienced as living persons. Joe Pullum's "C.W.A. Blues" from 1934 is
about the Civil Works Administration:
C.W.A., you're the best pal we ever knew,
You're killing Old Man Depression, and the breadlines too. 65
The C.W.A. was meant to help poor people through the bleak winter months
of 1933-34. In its four- month existence it had provided work for more than
four million people and had released them from the stigma attached to the
welfare recipient. No wonder Pullum had come to know it as "his best pal."
The P. W. A., the Public Works Administration, was another such agency.
Jimmie Gordon lavished praise on it in his 1936 "Don't Take Away My
P.W.A.":
P.W.A., you're the best old friend I ever seen,
Since the job ain't hard and the boss ain't mean. 66
Again the agency is seen as "the best old friend" by the singer. The P.W.A.
(1935-41) was a successful agency that had spent $6 billion to provide
money instead of relief. With the money they earned, the blues singers
claimed they could support their women. No wonder the P.W.A. was such
a popular agency.
A final image of a similar nature is provided by Charlie McCoy, who was
saved by his only friend, called "Charity," in 1934:
I said, Charity, Charity is my only friend,
When I lost my job, the charity took me in. 67
We have seen that the veteran bonus was an unprecedented windfall in the
Depression. So much so, that "the bonus" was personified by Charley Jordan
in his "Look What a Shape I'm In (Bonus Blues)" from 1937:
So, bye, bye, Bonus, till we meet again,
I know I have lost my only and best friend. 68
Katherine Baker personifies the blues in "Wild Women Blues" by quoting a
very old blues stanza about the inevitability of hardship in life:
The blues jumped a rabbit, run him one solid mile,
The rabbit got so worried, he cries just like a child. 69
156 Guido van Rijn
Conclusion
Finding a framework to make sense of the wealth of imagery in blues and
gospel lyrics is a crucial issue: it would appear that the framework Caroline
Spurgeon developed for Shakespeare's imagery is also applicable to the im-
agery in blues and gospel lyrics, much of it highly original within the lan-
guage as a whole. As the use of imagery is one of the necessary ingredients
distinguishing poetry from prose, this essay provides further evidence, for
those who still need to be convinced, of the poetic quality of blues and gospel
lyrics. Through lack of formal education the singers can hardly delve in the
realm of learning. Instead they find their inspiration in nature and they do
so with an uninhibited, pure sense of the powerful effect original imagery
can achieve.
We have noticed that the popularity of the food/sex metaphor accounts
for a large number of "food" images and that the most frequent type of
image employed is the personification which emphasizes the powerful effect
an organization, a system, a program, a nation or an abstract notion may
have on the individual. They are felt to be alive and as a result are turned into
human beings who make use of their five senses to experience the sensations
of life on the planet Earth. From this initial survey, it would also appear that
women singers use more imagery from the domestic domain and that men
use more imaginative imagery in the form of personifications.
Much further research remains to be done in this field: I have only
scratched the surface in this essay. It would, for example, be very interesting
to see what development the use of imagery underwent in the post-war
blues and gospel lyrics. Perhaps the increased possibilities for education in
the second half of the twentieth century will produce a more significant
number of images concerning learning and the arts. As I suggested above,
individual artists can be compared by a study of their respective use of
imagery. The same could be done to find differences between the various
locally determined kinds of blues and between the religious and the worldly
manifestations of the music.
Although more and more blues lyrics are published nowadays, the
scarcity of transcribed gospel lyrics is quite striking. In slavery time spiri-
tuals are generally acknowledged to have often contained coded references
to freedom, escape, and emancipation. This seems to continue into the era
of recorded gospel, for the songs, unsurprisingly, share with the blues many
images of being elsewhere or traveling there. The destination is Heaven in
this case, obviously, rather than Chicago or other points on the map, which
makes for both similarity and difference - whether by road:
Well, I'm moving up the king's highway, well, I'm moving up the King's
Highway,
157 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
Well, old Satan's on my back, trying hard to turn me back, but I'm moving
up the King's Highway. 70
by train:
This train is bound for glory, this train,
This train is bound for glory, and if you ride it, it must be holy. 71
by aeroplane:
Oh, Jesus is my air-o-plane, he holds this world in His hand,
He rides over all, He don't never fall, Jesus is my air-o-plane. 72
crossing the River Jordan:
I'm gonna cross at the rivers of Jordan,
Some of these days. 73
or just rising to glory:
Some glad morning, when this life is over, I'll fly away, I'll fly away,
To that home on Christ's celestial shore, I'll fly away, I'll fly away. 74
Images of fighting a Holy War are also common:
I'm a soldier in the army of the Lord. 75
while communion and communication with God are of course important
themes, the images sometimes drawing on modern technology:
Telephone to Glory, oh, what a joy divine,
You can feel the current ridin' on the line,
When you call the number, be sure you get the throne,
Then you can talk with Jesus on the royal telephone. 76
Unsurprisingly, there's much biblical imagery:
I want two wings to cover my feet, I want two wings to veil my face,
I want two wings to fly away and this world can't do me no harm. 77
(From Isaiah, 6:2: "Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with
twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain
he did fly")
In this chapter, I have suggested ways in which imagery in blues and
gospel music can be analyzed. The results show an abundance of original
imagery. A sharp focus on the marvelous imagery in these genres will en-
hance the understanding of the lyrics and will provide even better ways to
enjoy the music by a celebration of the poetry of blues and gospel music.
1 1 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
DAVE HEADLAM
Appropriations of blues and gospel - taking musical and textual elements
and recombining them in new contexts - is a topic bound up with issues of
race, identity, culture, and social and economic class, as well as music history
and theory. Viewed benignly, such appropriations are part of the inevitable
evolution of musical styles and cultural values, both within societies and be-
tween classes and races. In a broader view, however, they are emblematic of
the exploitation found throughout history in encounters between groups of
peoples. In the United States, black musical expressions in blues and gospel
have been appropriated by the recording industry for the mass white audi-
ence throughout the twentieth century, in a tension between music as iden-
tity and culture and music as mass-marketed, profitable diversion. Of the
many aspects to the role of blues and gospel in U.S. society, I am concerned
here with their contexts within the legacy of slavery, and the appropriation
of musical elements by other genres. How do blues and gospel songs give
rise to styles - rhythm and blues, rock'n'roll, doo-wop, rock, heavy metal,
soul, funk, disco, rap, ska, reggae, pop-gospel, contemporary Christian, and
others - which continue to dominate all forms of media today?
Categorization, crossover, fusion
Writing about music involves categorization to facilitate comparisons of
styles, but unless we discover a musical area equivalent to the Galapagos
Islands, we inevitably find that musical styles result from many influences
which defy clear boundaries. The terms "crossover" and "fusion," while
useful, rely on such categorization and thus need qualification. The roles of
Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley in the rise of rock'n'roll (r&r) in the 1950s
are often cited in relation to appropriation, crossover, and fusion, and will
serve as examples. In most writings, r&r is described as a crossover style -
one that crosses over from one core audience to another to create a new,
larger audience - emerging from a fusion of elements in music of the time:
[158]
( 1 ) country and western (c&w) music, known earlier as "hillbilly" and "folk" music,
and generally associated with a lower-class southern and western segment of
the white population;
159 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
(2) the popular or "p°p" style of mainstream white singers and Tin Pan Alley style
tunes, associated with a mass white audience and;
(3) rhythm and blues (r&b) styles, labeled "race" music before 1949 and associated
with a black audience.
The defining features of these categories are racial, regional, social, and
economic: reference points are positions on the Billboard charts, a changing
set of sales lists used by the music industry. However, r&r, c&w, pop, and
r&b are interrelated, catchall terms for varied musical styles that feature
interaction between white and black musical elements and which change
over time. What distinguishes r&r is its economic impact, influence on
subsequent musical styles, the social changes it reflected and fostered in
relations between whites and blacks, and the large audience it created, which
mark it as a music of crossover, fusion, and appropriation.
Chuck Berry, from a black, middle-class outskirt of St. Louis, developed
his musical style from his own varied background, not only singing in a
church choir and playing blues and r&b but also listening to pop and c&w.
His genius was to create a fusion from these sources adding a faster tempo,
increased emphasis on the guitar, a conversational and pure (white) sound-
ing vocal style with purposefully "clear" diction, and lyrics that appealed to
the growing population of white teenagers. 1 Writing new songs that draw on
this background, he crossed over the boundary from a specialized black r&b
market to the larger white, urban audience of the pop charts and emerging
r&r. Elvis Presley, poor and white from Tupelo, Mississippi, in the "cat" mold
of rebellious young whites who grew up amidst black influences, combined
similar sources (and adding his abilities in gospel and r&b to a mix of pop
and c&w styles) but in "cover" versions of existing songs. Covering songs in
varying styles was a common industry practice at the time, as labels tried to
find new audiences for the same material, rearranged to fit different tastes.
With his distinctive vocal sound and style and charismatic stage presence,
Presley broke through music industry categories, with songs such as "Hound
Dog" of 1956 appearing on the r&b, pop, and c&w charts at the same time.
Crossing over in his fusion of styles, Presley created a new, larger audience
that fueled a huge expansion in the size of the recording industry.
From the point of view of race and class, which drove music industry
categories of the time, Berry appropriated c&w, Presley appropriated r&b:
they took musical elements from a different culture, mixed them with other
elements, and made them their own. Berry's appropriation and his own
additions resulted in a phenomenally influential guitar-based flavor of r&r,
in which he was an original as a writer and performer. In the new context,
the moderated black forms of expression in his songs moved closer to white
listeners' tolerances - he was the "brown-eyed handsome man," marketed
160 DaveHeadlam
with strawberries on the covers of his second and third albums from Chess
records in Chicago - and Berry, like Louis Armstrong in jazz, found a voice
that sold well to whites (but was less welcome to black listeners). Presley's
appropriation resulted in a new type of expression, a southern white who
could combine r&b and c&w styles into "rockabilly" with an up-tempo
urgency that defined a youthful mass white audience. Presley was not an
original creator like Berry: rather, he fused and reinterpreted the styles he
had heard in his life. In the new context he created, Presley combined the
forbidden thrills associated with black expression and the rebellious image
of white trash in a sexy musical package that proved immensely popular and
influential.
Appropriation
The story of U.S. popular music chronicles the self-expression of smaller
groups, defined by race, region, or class; the mixing and recasting of elements
from this expression in local encounters between these groups; and the
marketing, exploiting, and transforming of that expression for a national,
mass audience. The personal nature, depth of feeling, and strong sense of
identity found in many black blues and gospel songs historically have found
only relatively small core audiences. To generate a larger audience, a musical
and social balance was struckbetween the music's intensely authentic aspects
and the broad tastes of the mass audience. This transformation took many
forms - both Berry and Presley found ways to appeal to a larger audience by
combining elements of white and black musics - and encompassed many
styles. An inevitable by-product of this process, however, is that the original
social and cultural meaning is lost as new contexts are imposed. When
British guitarist Eric Clapton or folk-blues emulator John Hammond Jr. sing
Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" (1936) thirty years later, for instance,
the meaning is significantly altered if not lost entirely under the new context
of rock music and a museum-like re-creation, respectively. Even with good
intentions, these white performers mimic a foreign expression and profit
from it.
The white covers of black r&b and r&r songs of the 1950s are emblem-
atic of the loss of meaning in such appropriations. Throughout this decade
and previous ones, as noted, record labels released different versions of
songs, trying to hit the mass audience or at least find a different niche
audience. As black r&b became popular, covers took on a racial tone, as
white performers recorded arrangements tailored for the large white au-
dience. The case of Pat Boone's cover of "Tutti Frutti" by Little Richard is
an example. Richard, like Chuck Berry, was an original in his own style of
1 61 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
r&r, using piano instead of guitar from the New Orleans-based tradition.
The song "Tutti Frutti" originally had bawdy lyrics full of gay sexual
doubles entendres; while Richard's recording had rewritten lyrics to suit the
target teenage audience, his outrageous demeanor and stage act relayed the
meaning of the original version. But in Boone's wholesome cover version,
on the infamous Dot label, the schoolboy presentation of the song reflects
nothing of the original context, but maintains enough of the beat and style to
appeal to the mass audience. The appropriation thus jettisoned the music's
meaning and created a new one, in which a "Tutti Frutti" could be part of a
Norman Rockwell- envisioned white 1950s teenage romance. Characteristic
of the industry contracts of the time, Richard received a small fee and roy-
alties on his own performance, and thus he did not profit from the cover
versions. Boone initially outsold Richard and fellow New Orleans r&r star
Fats Domino with his cover versions, but in a significant change emanating
from the popularity of r&r among the younger audience, the originals began
to sell more heavily than the covers and Boone, like Elvis, retired to more
popular styles. This change, paralleling blacks' struggles for equality in the
Civil Rights movement, was significant and pointed out the political and
social effects of these musical developments.
Despite the extent of the literature on blues and gospel music and their
influence, a question not generally asked in musical terms is "why"? Why are
elements of blues and gospel so engaging, even when presented in watered-
down form with their original meanings lost? Why do these elements stand
as a wellspring for musicians in popular and even classical styles? A metaphor
that I will use in this context is "grain," as in the "grain of the voice" from
Roland Barthes. 2 This grain, or texture in the sound and the associated ex-
pression, is a human element interpreted as a physical and emotional effort
that resonates with listeners, as they relate the emotions to their own lives.
These feelings combine pleasure and pain in a familiar way: the lives of
teenagers are obviously highly amenable to such feelings, as are people op-
pressed or down on their luck in love or in life, or people expressing religious
feelings that tend to emphasize the sweet reward in heaven for the painful
life below, as in gospel singing. Terms such as "bittersweet" and "soulful,"
and references to reaching, longing, and searching are found throughout
the expression and literature on this music. It is perhaps these universal
elements, which are transferred in performance but are difficult though en-
ticing to emulate in appropriation, that are essential to understanding the
continuing influence of blues and gospel music. However, while musicians
have continually regenerated themselves by "returning to the roots" of the
music - the original blues and gospel expression - the original performers
and creators of the expression and its social meanings tend to be left behind
in such cultural transactions.
162 DaveHeadlam
Blues to 1950s r&b and r&r
In the 1940s, many blues-related music forms, categorized now as r&b,
echoed city life, where the faster pace, electrified instruments, and an urban
audience and setting prompted a wide variety of blues-derived styles. The
recordings of this music generally come from small, independent record
labels, as the big labels stayed with white pop. Most of the styles of r&b were
based on blues forms, the twelve-bar format and variants, but in regularized,
speeded-up versions, often with added "stop time" verses, where the entire
ensemble would stop abruptly, leaving the singer to articulate a compelling
lyric solo. Branches of swing jazz and ensemble blues-influenced music
called "jump" and "shout" blues emerged, with main figures Louis Jordan,
Joe Turner, Roy Brown, Lloyd Price, Wynonie Harris, and Fats Domino.
Jordan, a singer and saxophone player, was known for his "jive" or jump
styles, in a small jazz-style combo with witty lyrical doubles entendres that
combined urban sophistication with down home references (e.g., "Saturday
Night Fish Fry"). Jordan's style was altered in songs like Roy Brown and
Wynonie Harris' versions of "Good Rockin' Tonight" (late 1940s) where
the boogie shuffle rhythm is augmented by the "rockin," gospel-influenced,
emphasized backbeat "2 and 4" style characteristic of r&r.
At the same time, up-tempo, electrified updates of country blues songs
emerged, with Elmore James doing updated, boogie-rocking versions (with
prominent electric guitar) of Robert Johnson songs like "Dust My Broom,"
and Muddy Waters transforming country blues elements in Chicago with
an evolving small combo eventually adding harmonica and blues piano to
guitar, bass, and drums. In the small group format, more emphasis was
given to the rhythmic elements and a defined beat in faster tempos; the
twelve-bar blues form and variants with "stop time" recitative-like vocal
breaks were, as with jump blues, standardized as the basic framework. The
electric guitar gained in influence and not only replaced the saxophone but
spawned its own unique forms: in Detroit, John Lee Hooker's solo guitar
and voice song, "Boogie Chillun" (1948), maintains only the outlines of the
blues form within its mostly riff and drone basis.
By the early 1950s, the transformation from blues to varying styles of
boogie and rockin' r&b and electric blues was complete. It had a strong
following in the black community but there was also some crossover interest
as a young white audience responded to black r&b vocal group and solo
styles. These events occurred, however, at a time when black performers
were not allowed into clubs unless they were on stage and were generally
ripped-off in their contracts, while whites and blacks could not even appear
on the same stage or dance together in public venues in the South (although
mixing and influence occurred in private or smaller settings). But DJ Allan
163 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
Freed noted that white teenagers were buying r&b records in Cleveland
in the early 1950s, so he applied the term "rock'n'roll" to a wide variety
of the music to give the songs a non-stereotyped identity, with the new
audience oblivious to the connotations of "rockin and rollin'" or "rollin'
and tumblin" or any one of many sexual metaphors. 3 With the incentive of
selling records to the emerging teenage baby-boom generation, the search
was on for the right mix of appropriated elements and ways around the
racial problem of convincing a mass audience of whites to buy black music.
While appropriations of black music had been an established practice from
ragtime at the turn of the century, the economic and youthful population
factors in the 1950s dramatically increased the pace.
The centers for music most involved in the appropriations of blues ele-
ments in the 1950s were Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. 4 In Chicago,
electric blues recordings on the Chess and Vee-Jay labels, among others, fea-
tured Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie
Dixon. Chess recordings epitomized the vocal, lyric, and small ensemble
aspects of the transformed blues, where the roles of Dixon as performer,
composer, producer, and arranger added the type of studio production fa-
miliar from pop music. The other side of music at Chess was the r&b and
r&r of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Diddley's pioneering style of rhythm
guitar playing was highly influential in Britain in the 1960s, but he never
achieved the chart success of Berry. Diddley attributed his own music to the
"Shout," an antecedent to gospel; his characteristic "Bo Diddley rhythm"
("shave and a haircut, two bits") has been variously related to sources rang-
ing from Cuban clave to ragtime Habanera. For white audiences, it was just
a good beat for dancing; for Diddley, however, bitter about money, r&b was
"rip-off and bullshit." 5
In Memphis, B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Junior Parker were among
the blues performers, who were often from Mississippi, recording and per-
forming in the late 1940s and 1950s at mixed race venues like the Palace
Theatre. White record producer Sam Phillips exploited the local social mix
by recording r&b and c&w by Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Earl Hooker, and
Rosco Gordon, and selling masters to labels like Chess. Phillips noted the
increased buying activity around r&b, formed his own label, Sun records,
and recorded Rufus Thomas among others, but, famously wanted to find a
white performer who could sing in an authentic black r&b style. That singer
was Elvis Presley. While not the first to combine black and white elements -
Frankie Laine (1947 "That's My Desire") and Johnnie Ray (1951, "Cry")
are often cited as earlier white singers who sounded "black," and "hillbilly
boogie" songs had appeared from 1945 (the Delmore Brothers "Hillbilly
Boogie") - his early exposure to church gospel, the personal quality in
his voice with its rebel tone and gospel grain, and his charismatic persona
164 DaveHeadlam
Ex. 11.1.
helped launch him as a superstar who generated a mass white audience. 6
Other similar white performers were Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny
Cash, and Roy Orbison, who all recorded at Sun Studios, and later Buddy
Holly from Texas.
The third center for r&r was New Orleans, where, in the 1950s, Fats
Domino and Little Richard emerged to represent two sides of black music
and performers. Domino was presented as a non-threatening figure in the
tradition of minstrel shows: a good time dance machine for white audi-
ences. Working with white producer Dave Bartholomew, and session players
like drummer Earl Palmer, Domino reworked Professor Longhair's (Henry
Roeland "Roy" Byrd) traditional New Orleans piano style of rollicking
gumbo boogie blues and high triplets to become one of the best-selling
1950s r&b and/or r&r artists. Little Richard, as discussed above, built on
a long tradition of showmanship from vaudeville to influence musicians
ranging from Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney to James Brown, George
Clinton and Prince. That Richard turned to the church in 1958 revealed the
gospel influences on his vocal style.
The sheer variety evident in lists of the "first" r&r songs indicate the extent
of the crossover and fusion at the time. 7 "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston with
Ike Turner, recorded in Memphis in 1951, is often cited in this context, and
features a compendium of r&r-style elements in its lyrics, performance, and
instrumentation. But the true economic impact of r&r came from white
covers. A significant appropriation of the early 1950s was Bill Haley's cover
of "Shake Rattle and Roll," originally by Joe Turner. Turner, from Kansas
City, was a blues shouter who appeared with pianist Pete Johnson in one of
the "Spirituals to Swing" concerts at Carnegie Hall (1938), and whose songs
are quintessential turnings of r&b into proto-r&r expressions. In "Shake,
Rattle, and Roll," based on an unwavering twelve-bar blues form, a boogie
acoustic bass is doubled by the piano left hand under continuous right-hand
piano licks, saxophones and electric guitar, and drums slapping the snare
on beats 2 and 4. The bass is still mostly walking in a jazz style, but adds
some characteristic rock'n'roll rhythms under syncopated accompaniment
figures (see Ex. 11.1). Over a saxophone counterpoint in verses 3 and 7,
Turner shows his vocal prowes: the power in the high register with a quick
vibrato, particularly on the word "Devil." The text contains lots of sexual
innuendo, of the "one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store" variety, mostly
too salty for a wide release.
165 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
g i J. | r
Ex. 11.2.
Bill Haley, following earlier c&w crossover figures Jimmie Rodgers, who
sang "blue yodels," and Hank Williams, a r&r forerunner, converted his
western swing group into an r&b cover band, the "Comets." Haley's adapta-
tion of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," from 1954, is in a faster tempo, with the
prominent guitar and saxophones playing short, rockin' riffs in call-and-
response answers to the vocal phrases, a typical blues effect missing from the
Turner version. The series of four solos ends with the famous fourth solo:
electric guitar in a proto-Chuck Berry style with the virtuosic descending
scale in quadruple plucking. Although the bass, now electric, still walks in a
jazz-derived style, it also combines with the saxophones in the quintessential
rock'n'roll rhythm (Ex. 11.2). The lighter tone of the voice, the greater use of
the guitar and more filling in the higher-register space, along with the faster
tempo gives Haley's version a lighter, r&r sound compared to the heavier,
lower-tessitura Turner recording, and the text, altered but not completely
devoid of doubles entendres, loses its meaning in the new context. 8
The songs recorded by Presley at Sam Phillip's Sun Studios in Memphis
and early on for R.C.A. Victor are all appropriations of different styles. Elvis
was a master cover artist, but what separated him from Pat Boone (the
two sold the most records in the 1950s) was his ability to reinterpret the
songs adding his own "edge" to the sound rather than merely rendering a
sanitized form. Hedging his bets but also anticipating the changing audience,
Philips released Elvis records with one side r&b, the other side c&w, with
crossover elements found in common between the two styles. Elvis' first
hit song was "That's All Right," from a famous session where he fooled
around during a break, imitating Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's performance
recorded for Bluebird in 1946, and the two accompanying musicians, Scotty
Moore and Bill Black, both well versed in country music styles, accompanied
him in a raucous "rockabilly" style derived from western swing. 9 Crudup
never received any royalties from Elvis' recording and died penniless, his
contribution to the music that started a marketing and recording revolution
unacknowledged, his role in this famous appropriation emblematic of the
fate of many original black artists in the sudden rise of r&r. 10
Crudup's tune "That all Right, Mama," has string bass and drums in a
swing jazz style, while the slightly distorted electric guitar chords and 2-3
string strumming solos are from an adapted country blues style. The form is
in a modified blues form, a ten-bar setting, like a twelve-bar form with bars
7 and 8 omitted. In the setting of the lyrics, bars 1-4 are different in each verse,
766 DaveHeadlam
using stop verse form, with bars 5-10 setting the refrain, "That's all right,
That's all right, That's all right now Mama, any way you do"; this refrain is
thus a mini blues form within the larger verse. Crudup adds several irregular
features: he compensates for the omitted return to I in the blues form by
playing with the changes in his bars 6 and 7, adding a move to I and moving
through IV— I— V in irregular durations, and adds and omits two beats in
several places. Crudup also alters the form by extending the final vocal verse
("Dee dee") by two bars, so that the final "That's all right now Mama" is
delayed for a greater effect when it comes.
Elvis' shorter version is at about the same tempo, but sounds more
snappy because of the clearer bass attacks. The opening guitar strumming
and the clean sound and country licks of the solo guitar section set an
upbeat country atmosphere, rather than a jazzed-up country blues. The
ambiguities of downbeats in Crudup's version are clarified with clear chord
changes, but Elvis intensifies the song by shortening each verse to nine
bars, omitting the balancing tenth bar on I; this omission propels the song
forward after each verse. In the final "Dee Dee" verse, he also shortens the
beginning to three bars, adding "I need your lovin'" to link the verse into
the change of chord and refrain. In the intensification in the chorus section
with the threefold "That's all right," Elvis extends the final "Mama" adding
a country-ish slide up to the note in his characteristic seductive style. This
inflection, also reflected in his interjected "I need your lo-vin'" in the final
verse, changes the song from Crudup's declarative version to Elvis' highly
suggestive one: that it may be "all right" for the woman involved to mistreat
him, but she might want to reconsider. It is this element of a sly, sexy wink
in the sound combined with the rhythmic drive from the omitted balancing
tenth bar in the form that reflects Elvis' effect on teenagers, and the vastly
greater success of his version over Crudup's.
Blues to 1960s rock and gospel to soul/funk
At the end of the 1950s and leading into the 1960s, a split occurred in
the musical world viewed through the lens of blues and gospel appropri-
ations. Soul music stemming from gospel supplanted blues-based r&b, as
described below. Meanwhile, following the abrupt end of the first genera-
tion of rock'n'rollers in the U.S. by death, gaol, injury, scandal, and the army,
the rise of Calypso from Harry Belafonte, and a few years of industry pap
of the American Bandstand variety, white musicians in the U.S. and Britain
became interested in r&r, r&b and Chicago electric blues. This formed the
basis for four developments: the Liverpool bands in Britain, most notably
the Beatles; London groups like the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Led Zeppelin
167 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
influenced by Chicago and even Mississippi blues; their counterparts in the
U.S., such as the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Canned Heat; and a folk/
blues movement in the U.S. featuring Bob Dylan, which had a psychedelic
folk/blues rock aspect on the West Coast along with some Latin/blues mixes,
in bands such as Santana. It took the entire decade for rock musicians and
their critics to catch up to musical developments in the black music world, as
most white rock groups went through their blues reworking years to eventu-
ally develop their own style. What made rock music different from preceding
appropriations was the enormous wealth and influence that modern media
exposure and the baby-boomer audience fostered.
The 1 960s interest in blues-based music featured a group of white player-
scholars - John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, John Hammond, and
Al Wilson, among others - who sparked a blues revival, which revitalized
the careers of many older black blues players. B. B. King, Muddy Waters
and other blues players performed for adoring white throngs in the late
1960s, and as music critics and scholars became aware of the blues tradi-
tion and its influence on rock music, they began to document the blues
and create a "museum exhibit" context valuing authenticity and original-
ity. Older players, Son House, Skip James, Mance Lipscomb, Robert Pete
Williams, Rev. Gary Davis, and Mississippi's Fred MacDowell and John Hurt,
were rediscovered and brought back into the recording studio and onto the
stage to play for white audiences. In general, the rediscoverers paid their
debt to the original musicians and helped them to at least some proportion
of recompense. Blues came to be highly valued in white venues, but not by
black audiences. The scholarly and performance-based appropriation was
largely based in Britain, and this trend has continued, as evidenced by this
book.
In Britain, r&r and Chicago electric blues had a huge influence, primarily
in the two centers of Liverpool and London. Visits by Big Bill Broonzy
(1951), Muddy Waters (1958), Sonny Boy Williamson (1963), John Lee
Hooker, and others, which included playing with the inexperienced white
British players, inspired the nascent blues crowd. The groups that emerged -
the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and others -
evolved rock music by combining elements of r&r, r&b, and Chicago electric
blues with their own native influences. Commentators on the enormously
successful British rock music scene were alerted to the origins of the music,
and the Mississippi Delta original performers became legendary. With its
appropriation of American blues, and a fusion of blues elements with other
styles, British rock music raised the awareness of the United States to its
own cultural heritage.
The musical rise of the blues and its transformation into rock music can
be seen in the careers of two guitarists, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. 11 In
168 DaveHeadlam
Britain, interest in blues and j azz was fostered by Chris Barber, Alexis Korner,
Cyril Davies, Graham Bond and John Mayall in the early 1960s; these pio-
neers set the stage for Clapton and others. Clapton had a passion for Chicago
electric blues and the earlier Mississippi Delta Blues, and found influences
in Robert Johnson, B. B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Otis
Rush, and Magic Sam. Several group experiences playing in the Yardbirds
and Bluesbreakers lead up to the "supergroup" Cream, which recorded rock
versions of blues songs by Johnson and others. 12 Adapting blues to the power
trio group of guitar, bass, and drums, Cream had a dual nature of reworked
blues and newly composed songs, some in a transformed "psychedelic" style
originating in the drug scene on the U.S. West Coast. The blues songs became
the vehicles for extended, virtuosic improvisations in concert, and in songs
like "Sunshine of Your Love," Cream prepared the ground for Led Zeppelin
and later heavy metal. Here the blues progression became simplified into
the blues riff, then the heavy metal riff, a single motive that constituted a
reduction to one driving element. This emphasis on the riff, with minimal
harmonic motion, can be heard in Hooker's "Boogie Chillun" and even
earlier, in songs like "Spoonful" and the "Rollin and Tumblin' " family of
songs. 13 After Cream, Clapton's high point came with his personal blues
transformation, the song "Layla"; Clapton has returned again and again to
the blues, most recently in his From the Cradle (Reprise Records 1994), and
with the authenticity bestowed by recordings with B. B. King and others, he
has come to personify the British appropriations of blues.
The case of Jimi Hendrix is emblematic of the power of the "made
in Britain" label to overcome racial barriers. An accomplished performer
of all black styles in the States, playing with many of the black stars of
r&r and soul - Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, B. B. King, the
Supremes, Chuck Jackson, Solomon Burke, Muddy Waters, Albert King,
the Isley Brothers - and influenced by Buddy Guy and others he heard
while touring, he was largely relegated to black venues of the "chitlin"
circuit of black bars and clubs in the South. Hendrix went to Britain at
the behest of ex- Animal Chas Chandler and became an overnight sensation
for his "authentic" (black) abilities. After an auspicious beginning jam-
ming with Cream, Hendrix was fitted with a multiracial group, the Jimi
Hendrix Experience, then returned to the States to achieve superstar status.
A blues guitarist in the great tradition, yet at the same time a rock musician
and innovative composer with all the psychedelic trappings of the 1960s,
Hendrix brilliantly combined the technological and musical trends of his
own heritage and British music developments to create a music in which
the blues elements are thoroughly assimilated, yet remain distinctive. His
emphasis on the sound of the guitar helped usher in the era of rock as timbre
music. His best-known song, "Purple Haze," combines a potent opening lick
169 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
with the famous "Purple Haze chord," a jazzy dominant #9 (E-GJJ-D-G),
in a sixties, LSD-filled statement of the blues. Hendrix and soul singer Otis
Redding, both headliners at the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1 967,
where Hendrix ended his set by setting his guitar on fire, were at the pinnacle
of the blues/ rock and gospel/soul reworkings of the 1 960s. Critical and audi-
ence reaction was mixed to Hendrix, however, particularly among the black
audience, who didn't identify with his rock leanings; to the largely white
audience at Monterey and at his other shows, he was the personification
of the exotic black other, "superspade," and the pure, uninhibited emotion
that was considered a caricature of the black performer by blacks. 14 Hendrix
was at the end of the black rock guitar tradition leading through John Lee
Hooker to Chuck Berry; with the notable exceptions of Vernon Reid, Lenny
Kravitz, and Prince, following black guitarists like Robert Cray have tended
to stay within the traditional blues camp, while white guitarists like Stevie
Ray Vaughan and Eddie Van Halen have emulated Hendrix and continued
his legacy.
Musically, the transformation of blues into rock is largely a reduction,
in instrumental forces, rhythmic complexity, harmonic motion and form,
with a simplification to a basic riff amidst a syncopated rock beat. The rock
combo, with its basic guitar-bass-drums-(keyboard) setup simplified the
textures of the urban blues models. The biggest change, aside from the
volume, is in the rhythm: from a fluid, jazzy or bluesy shuffle rhythm, to
the emphasis on backbeats 2 and 4, to an unwavering straight eighth-note
rock rhythm with emphasized beats and syncopations. The rhythms of
Cream's "Crossroads" (from Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues") and
Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" (from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love") are
representative. 15
The rise and transformation of rock music from its blues-based be-
ginnings is contrasted between the Beatles, who continued to evolve, and
Rolling Stones, who largely stayed within their style of blues-rock. The
Beatles, part of the r&b and r&r-influenced music scenes in Liverpool,
England and Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1950s, started playing songs by
Presley, Berry, Little Richard, Perkins, Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran,
as well as by vocal groups the Shirelles and Isley Brothers, taking songs by
Leiber and Stoller and others and thereby appropriating the appropriated
styles. They also sang show tunes and pop songs, foreshadowing their own
eclectic output. While big sellers in Britain in the early 1960s, the American
label Capitol owned by British EMI passed on their early records, and so
the Beatles' initial songs came out on the black Vee-Jay label from Chicago;
within a year, Capital realized their mistake and squeezed Vee-Jay out. This
industry action was emblematic of the effect of the Beatles: their appro-
priated style squeezed out the original black artists and they provided a
170 DaveHeadlam
model for the "rock group" in which black performers have had almost no
part. One of the Beatles' early hits was "Twist and Shout," originally by the
black vocal group the Isley Brothers. The Isley Brothers had first recorded
"Shout" in 1959, a gospel-type celebration song, then added the popular
"twist" dance element, from Chubby Checker's 1959 cover of Hank Ballard
and the Midnighters tune called "The Twist," to the formula in 1962. The
Beatles' version is characteristic, with excellent production in the guitar
sound, and high-energy vocals and arrangement. The tension in the Beatles
between the bluesier Lennon and pop-leaning McCartney went mostly in
the latter direction until the group split in 1970, with a legacy as the most
influential popular music group of all time.
The Rolling Stones started in the Crawdaddy Club in London playing
their own versions of r&b: their first five albums included covers of
Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Garret Strong,
Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, Slim Harpo, Rufus Thomas, Marvin Gaye,
Valentinos, Drifters, Coasters, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Bo Diddley,
Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Don Covay, and Arthur Alexander. Their record-
ing of "Little Red Rooster" in 1964, from a Howlin' Wolf version of 1961,
and "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," vastly outsold the originals, but, un-
like Led Zeppelin and other groups, the Stones followed Clapton and their
American counterparts Canned Heat and others in acknowledging their
debt and supplying royalties to the original blues performers, such as Muddy
Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Their own style emerged in the song, "(I Can't
Get No) Satisfaction," a riff-based reworking of Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be
Satisfied," originally from 1948 (adapted from a church-inspired song, "I Be's
Troubled"). 16 Along with the riff and guitar timbre, they substituted the ba-
nalities of American advertising for the blues male macho sentiments of the
original. This loss of meaning in British reworkings of American blues was
a necessary part of the reason for its success with white audiences in the U.S.
Gospel to 1950s and 1960s vocal groups, and 1960s soul
Gospel, like jazz, has a mixed-race heritage, with parallel streams of black
gospel, from Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and the Johnson Gospel
Singers and Dorsey Trio from the 1920s, and white Christian gospel, start-
ing from James D. Vaughan, who published his Gospel Chimes songbook
and organized The Vaughan Quartet, the first white, all-male, professional
gospel quartet, in 1910. These two tracks continue to the present day. In
the 1940s, as jump blues took on a wider audience, Mahalia Jackson had a
gospel million seller on the Apollo label with "Move On Up a Little Higher"
and in the 1950s signed with Columbia to become a crossover success. Elvis
1 71 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
Presley, who solidified the move to white r&r, also ushered in the contempo-
rary white gospel sound, with "His Hand in Mine" (1960), demonstrating
the gospel source of his vocals in the process. The r&r era features two
important developments in black music styles. First, black vocal groups,
based in gospel "Jubilee" quartets, jazz vocals, and popular groups of the
1940s, created the "doo-wop" and more up-tempo r&r vocal styles that
predated the mass crossover appeal of solo r&r. Second, black solo artists,
particularly Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, appropriated gospel elements into
r&b, and r&b elements into gospel, to create soul music. In the 1960s, both
solo artists and vocal groups developed soul, which combined r&b, gospel,
and popular styles in Detroit's Motown, Memphis' Stax and from Muscle
Shoals, Alabama, Fame, then took two routes: a more sophisticated, orches-
tral sound in Philadelphia smooth soul leading to the crossover disco styles;
and a harder rhythmic edge as funk in James Brown's music.
The elements of gospel featured and appropriated were:
(1) the a cappella style vocal groups, originating in Jubilee quartets;
(2) the call-and-response "preaching" style drawn from the church;
(3) the showman aspect of costumes and dance routines from the church;
(4) the syncopated dance rhythms of the hand-clapping and body-shaking rituals
of church participation; and,
(5) the virtuosic use of ornamentation in solo singing, particularly in female solo
voices.
While gospel music flourished in cities alongside blues, in Detroit, Chicago,
and Philadelphia, and a tradition of white Christian music existed alongside
black gospel for much of the century - as white folk and c&w existed along-
side black blues - the appropriation of gospel was largely by black artists.
Only relatively recently have white singers found a mass pop audience using
gospel styles.
If the guitar is the quintessential blues instrument, the voice is the gospel
instrument. Gospel expression stems from worksongs, church singing, camp
and revival meetings, and encompasses spirituals and other religious styles
including the choral jubilee singing. The rhythm of gospel is a vocal rhythm,
in the tradition of church preaching, where hand clapping sets the beat. The
vocal style and body rhythms of gospel are difficult to emulate: whereas there
have been many white blues guitarists, there are few white gospel singers
of similar stature. Singers, particularly female, of jazz, blues, and gospel,
borrow from one another yet are distinctive in the approach to articulation,
the bend in the pitch, the continuity or break in the release, the amount of
breath in the sound, and the inflections of the lyrics.
The male vocal groups in the 1940s were one of the initial gospel-related
venues for black performers to cross over to the larger pop audience. The
172 DaveHeadlam
Soul Stirrers, formed in 1934, were recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library
of Congress in 1936, but later began singing newly composed gospel songs
with lead singer Rebert H. Harris. Harris ad-libbed in syncopation against
the group, setting the stage for the 1950s style, and his successor Sam Cooke.
Cooke became a sex symbol in gospel, eventually moving into pop and soul
music, following the move of many of the black vocal groups who wanted
to cash in on the r&r audience. From initial religious subjects, these groups
changed to sing songs with lyrics about idealized romance and teenage love,
wearing suits and performing snappy dance numbers for audiences, and
changing their names - for instance, the Royal Sons to the "5" Royales in
1952, and the Gospel Starlighters to the Famous Flames, featuring James
Brown. 17 A few groups featured lyrics more characteristic of blues, such as
the Royals (later Midnighters) with their "Annie" series from 1954 and the
Dominoes' crossover hit, "Sixty Minute Man" of 1 95 1 . Eventually, however,
most of these vocal groups, which evolved into the "doo-wop" vocal groups
of the 1950s (many of which were recorded by Bobby Robinson of Harlem
including the Orioles, the Ravens, Mellow Moods, and myriad other names
grouped into birds, insects, flowers, and cars) projected an innocence that
represented an appropriation of the vocal style of gospel but with a loss of
its passion or meaning. The simplified musical form, using the progression
I-VI-IV-V-I became as ubiquitous as the twelve-bar blues form.
In a seminal doo-wop recording, the black vocal group the Chords,
singing in harmony over a standard combo of saxophone, guitar, bass, piano,
and drums, recorded "Sh-Boom" in 1954 in New York City for the Atlantic
"Cat" label. The song included "Sh-Boom" and "da-da-da" in the accom-
panying parts, influenced by jazz scatting and the nonsense lyrics of jump
blues, a bass voice solo line along with offbeat guitar riffs, and a heavy sax
solo. Appearing on the pop charts, it was covered in Chicago by a white
Canadian vocal quartet called the Crew Cuts on the Mercury label. The new
version added an orchestra and choir background, along with a walking
bass section. The Chords were on to something new, the Crew Cuts were
reminiscing on the swing era; typically, however, the Chords went to no. 5
on the pop charts, then were not able to re-create their success and faded,
but the Crew Cuts made it to no. 1 and sold a million records and had a run
of hits. 18
Following "Sh-Boom," vocal group music dominated radio in the 1950s,
becoming a crossover phenomenon. While the doo-wop groups had always
been somewhat vacuous in their lyric content, the Coasters achieved chart
success with straight parody recordings by Lieber and Stoller, who were
part of the rising production teams for records, which led to Phil Spector
and George Martin in the 1960s. Lieber and Stoller epitomize the Tin Pan
Alley- like songsmith tradition that persisted in the development of r&r; like
1 73 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
Irving Berlin and George Gershwin before them, these writers were white
and Jewish and felt an affinity for black music, writing new songs using
black music elements, and working with record labels and producers to
create hit songs "in the style of," such as "Hound Dog" written for Big Mama
Thornton but a hit for Elvis. Their parody records had a fast shuffle beat,
nonsense lyrics, and "yakety" sax chorus, in songs like "Yakety Yak" (1958)
and "Charlie Brown" (1959). The Platters were another successful group,
lasting from the 1 950s to the late 1 960s, one of the few black vocal groups with
no. 1 hits on pop charts in the late 1950s. The Drifters, formed in 1953 with
lead singer Clyde McPhatter, who had a gospel background, transformed in
1958 to a group name with changing personnel - forerunners of continuing
phenomena in the 1960s - recording commercial r&b, with violins instead
of guitars and influencing Motown. These groups used various strategies,
from vocal purity, pop instrumentations and schlocky arrangements, suits
and funny hair-dos, to humor, to cross over to the white audience. The
level of vocal ability on many of the vocal group recordings is astounding,
however, and shows a wide variety of influences.
The Ravens' recording of "Give me a Simple Prayer" is a fusion of
gospel sentiments and stylings with a doo-wop setting, illustrating the re-
ligious origins of the vocal group sound also clear in the Moonglow's "Ten
Commandments of Love." In style, The Ravens' song could be a love song,
but with solace supplied by inspiration from above rather than a girl. The
piano plays the standard eighth-note high chords over a slow bass and drums
with cymbal also tapping out the eighths. 19 Following a group fanfare im-
itating a wordless church choir invocation and a solo piano arpeggio, the
solo vocal part starts off muted, but grows in intensity over a "ba-do" vocal
group setting that evolves into words to accompany the singer. The ending is
marked by voices reaching into the stratosphere as the climax of the gradual
ascent throughout.
With the rise of r&r in the mid-1950s, the male and emerging female
vocal groups turned to up-tempo vocal r&r songs. The laid-back lyrics and
emotion were replaced by a youthful urgency, evident in songs like "Why do
Fools Fall in Love," by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in 1955. The fast rise
and fall of many vocal groups is exemplified by Lymon's ascent into stardom
at age thirteen, then descent into drugs and death at age twenty- five in 1968.
As was customary at the time, many of the songs by the black groups were
covered by white vocal groups, with some appropriation of styles, but the
original groups were already so bland in their subject matter and pure vocal
quality that the white groups often didn't have far to go in their versions. 20 As
the decade progressed, following the example of Ray Charles, vocal groups
began to add some urgency and meaning - soul elements - to their styles,
culminating in the vocal groups of Motown and others, including the Staples
174 DaveHeadlam
Singers, a Chicago family band of bluesy gospel with hit songs on gospel,
r&b, and soul charts through the 1970s.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, "girl" groups joined the male doo-wop and
r&r vocal groups. Singing songs written by production teams such as the
Brill Building writers from New York (the Shirelles, Chiffons, Shangri-Las,
Ronettes, Chantels, Marvelettes, Crystals, Ikettes) and the Holland-Dozier-
Holland writing team of Motown (the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas) ,
these groups had huge hit records but mostly came and went quickly. The
singing on these records is generally very pop-oriented, with the grain of
the voice muted for a generic sound. As Ray Charles did with doo-wop
male groups, Aretha Franklin reinfused the female groups with the gospel
elements of soul in her Atlantic recordings in the mid-1960s.
Solo black singing at the beginning of the 1950s was dominated by the
style of Nat King Cole, a singer with a beautiful tone and classical control
of pitch and timbre that was sufficiently appealing to a mass audience that
Cole had his own television show (1956-57). Times were, though, still so
dangerous that he was dragged from the stage and beaten at a 1956 concert
in Birmingham Alabama by the White Citizens Council in a backlash against
r&r, since he represented "nigger" music. 21 In the mid-1950s, "Brother" Ray
Charles, black, blind, a heroin addict during his greatest recordings, added
gospel vocal and musical elements to an r&b style developed by working with
Guitar Slim in New Orleans - gospel piano licks and a backing female chorus
(the Raelettes) that responded to Charles in the manner of a church choir
following the preacher - and so initiated soul music, linking the spiritual
with the sexual. The new style, songs like "I Got a Woman" and "Hallelujah,
I Love Her So," and the breakthrough hit, "What'd I Say," was controversial,
and Charles was criticized for violating the sanctity of the church with the
music of the devil, in a continuance of the confrontation between these
two forces found throughout the history of blues and gospel. 22 In the early
1960s, Charles moved from Atlantic to R.C.A. Victor, and into an eclectic
mix of styles that included c&w and pop, as well as gospel and r&b.
Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" (1953), is a shuffle r&b tune with the
usual elements, the Texas "lope" and Kansas City swing, but the vocals add
the gospel element, with its wide range and embellishments, particularly
toward the ending, with the "she's all right" repetitions imitating gospel
endings. Charles reportedly improvised new lyrics to a gospel tune and
developed the song from a combination of r&b and gospel elements. Charles'
biggest hit, "What'd I Say" from 1959, came from an improvised interchange
between the singer, backing group, band, and audience: the preacher with his
congregation. The Wurlitzer electric piano dominates an opening outlining
the blues form with solos over a Latin drum beat. The r&r feel of the opening
is supplemented with answering choir and brass entries, but gives way to
1 75 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
a gospel dialogue, "unnh-hunnh" patter, over Charles' moans, cries, and
gospel feel, with "shake that thing" and "I feel alright" expressing his passion
for the body instead of the Lord.
Charles, covered by Presley among others, incorporated gospel elements
into r&b, while Sam Cooke began from gospel and added pop and r&b
elements. Both these singers, and James Brown, followed the gospel vocal
styles of the Reverends Julius Cheeks and Claude Jeter; these two sang in
church and jubilee quartets (1940s) and Cheeks perfected a hard-shouting
style in the Sensational Nightingales while Jeter featured his falsetto in the
Swan Silvertones. 23 After singing gospel in the Soul Stirrers (1950), Cooke
released a secular song, "Lovable," under the name of Dale Cook, then, "You
Send Me," a no. 1 pop and r&b hit on Keen records in 1957. His success at
crossing over to the white pop and black r&b audiences invoked condem-
nation by his gospel audience, but he continued, establishing a record and
publishing company, Sar and Kags music, until his death in 1964. The female
counterpart to both Charles and Cooke was "Lady Soul," Aretha Franklin,
following in the footsteps of her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin, who had recorded
over seventy albums of preaching and singing with Chess Records. In 1967,
Franklin moved from an unsuccessful stint at Columbia singing pop and
jazz to Atlantic, where her recording in the Fame Studios of Muscle Shoals
("I Never Loved a Man"), then New York - with the same white southern
musicians - reasserted the female element from the gospel tradition in soul,
recalling influences Clara Ward, Roberta Martin, and Mahalia Jackson, and
crossing over to the pop charts in the process. Franklin's range and fluency is
evident on "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," where, over a gospel piano
and organ, she builds her musical and lyric argument slowly, leading to
powerful but understated climaxes with backing choir. She wrote many of
her songs, yet many hits were written by whites - " (You Make Me Feel Like)
A Natural Woman" by Brill Building writers Carole King and Gerry Coffin,
and "Chain of Fools" by Don Covay, for instance, continuing the legacy of
Lieber and Stoller. However, her recording of Otis Redding's "Respect" - no.
1 on both the pop and r&b charts - created an anthem for the black move-
ment and set the tone for the age in terms of feminism and the musical style
of mixed-race southern soul topped by a distinctive black voice: the blues
and gospel reconciled. In 1972, her double LP of gospel, Amazing Grace,
went to no. 7 on the pop chart in a remarkable crossover. Her mix of gospel,
soul, and funk, backed by the Sweet Inspirations including Cissy Houston,
inspired Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker, and the more recent
Erykah Badu, among many others.
In the 1960s, soul music dropped its r&b basis in the blues form to take
on a new harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary in manifestations from the
Stax/Volt labels in Memphis and Fame label in Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
776 DaveHeadlam
the Vee-Jay label in Chicago, and the Motown/Tamla labels in Detroit.
From Memphis and Muscle Shoals, both distributed by Atlantic Records,
the passion of gospel and the jump blues/jazz band instrumentation of
r&b combined with the southern white honky-tonk influences of many of
the local session players in racially mixed house bands. The result was the
records of Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin,
and others, with their distinctive rhythmic drive, instrumental setting, and
gospel-derived vocals. Stax, with multiracial house band "Booker T. and
MGs," notably combined the talents of black and white musicians, backing
almost exclusively black stars, to become a major force in the music of the
1960s. It was begun in 1959 by whites Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton in
Memphis, adding black executive Al Bell in 1965. With Atlantic's distrib-
utorship and production from Jerry Wexler, hits from William Bell, Otis
Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, Isaac Hayes, and even instru-
mental records like "Green Onions" followed. Redding was the star, from
Macon, Georgia, and he was ambitious composing, arranging, and (in one
of the rising number of examples of black musicians influenced by the white
music of the 1960s) listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. With his success
at Monterey he was poised for the mass white market, but he died in a plane
crash in 1967, his posthumous folk-like no. 1 hit, "Sitting on the Dock of
the Bay" hinting at a new fusion of soul and c&w.
Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals was started in 1958 by Tom Stafford,
Rick Hall, and Billy Sherrill. They added writers and players Dan Penn and
Spooner Oldham, and singers Etta James, Arthur Alexander, Jimmy Hughes,
Percy Sledge - whose hit "When a Man Loves a Woman" defined the sexual
tension characteristic of soul music - Wilson Pickett, Arthur Conley, and,
most famously, Aretha Franklin. As with r&r and r&b, British fans took on
soul music, with tours by the big singers, magazines, clubs, and, of course,
appropriations, as in the Beatles album Rubber Soul. While the British took
over r&r, however, they fell short imitating soul; the Beatles, among others,
could not reproduce the soul sound.
The rise of soul alongside rock music is seen in the history of Atlantic
records, the distributor for the Stax and Fame labels. Like many labels, such
as Chess from the Polish Chess Brothers and Modern Records from the
Lebanese Bihari Brothers, Atlantic Records was started by first generation
Americans of immigrant parents. Formed in 1947 by Ahmet and Nesuhi
Ertegun, sons of a Turkish Ambassador, and including Herb Abramson and
later Jerry Wexler (1953), Atlantic used the talents of music director Jesse
Stone, engineer Tom Dowd, and top studio musicians to record black jazz,
r&b, and r&r, appealing to the r&b audience with slick production and ef-
fective distribution. Atlantic's production, all-white owners, producers, ar-
rangers, mixed race writers and studio musicians, and black stars, represents
177 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
the recording industry set-up for the chart-topping r&b songs in the 1950s.
In the 1960s, Atlantic became the distributor for Stax/Volt and Fame and
so aided and profited from the enormous success and influence of soul
music. Atlantic's r&b and soul recordings included Joe Turner, Sticks McGee,
Clovers, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, LaVern Baker, the Drifters, the Coasters,
Clyde McPhatter, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Rufus
Thomas, Albert King, Otis Redding, and others. With the changing climate
in the 1960s, however, when racial boundaries were re-established in the
recording world, Atlantic moved more to white imitation models, like Bobby
Darin and Sonny and Cher, then to the white rock groups, like Cream, Led
Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and even the Bee Gees, whose music was based
on the styles of the black musicians that the label had previously recorded.
In Chicago, the labels on "Record Row," including Chess and Vee-Jay,
moved into soul recordings in the 1960s, featuring Etta James, Fontella Bass,
Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler of the Impressions, and producer Carl
Davis. The smooth soul sounds played on the black radio station W.V.O.N,
continuing into the mid-1970s with groups like the Chi-Lites. Mayfield,
along with Isaac Hayes, were instrumental in the evolution of the 1970s
"blaxploitation" movie soundtracks like Superfly and Shaft that provided a
brief moment of mass interest in black film. This music, along with James
Brown's funk, has been the most influential and the source for most of the
digital samples in rap music.
Motown from Detroit and later Los Angeles was an evolution of 1950s
vocal groups tailored to appeal to the mass white audience, with an urban,
sophisticated, show-business atmosphere. Impressed by the songwriting
from the "Brill Building" writers in the early 1960s - Bobby Darin, Neil
Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and others - and
in the spirit of "professionalism" in pop music, Motown founder Berry
Gordy worked initially with Jackie Wilson to create a hybrid black pop
style. By careful sculpting of the grain in the sound and balancing of el-
ements drawn from black sources with pop appeal to the white audience,
Gordy then founded Motown (1959), which came to be known as "Hitsville,
U.S.A." Gordy and others were so successful in integrating black music into
pop that for two years in 1963-65, the Billboard charts did not list a sepa-
rate national r&B chart. 24 The Motown lineup included groups such as the
Marvellettes, Miracles, Temptations, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Gladys
Knight and the Pips, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Martha Reeves
and Vandellas, Velvettes, Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, and writers Holland/
Dozier/Holland among others, while Gordy's methods included creating a
finishing school for his performers with instructions on deportment and
control of media exposure. Critics of Motown accused Gordy of bleach-
ing out the "blackness" of his performers, but Motown produced hit music,
178 DaveHeadlam
slickly produced, varied in instrumentation, celebrating love, dancing, soul,
funk, pop, memorable tunes, and celebration. There was even a little protest
thrown in to reflect the times, for instance, in "What's Going On," Marvin
Gaye's protest song with the memorable James Jamerson bass line and
"War" by Edwin Starr in a quintessential protest statement. 25 Into the 1970s,
Motown artists were part of the move to electronic and psychedelic soul,
funk and disco, anticipated by the Chambers Brothers (a black hippie group
with a white drummer and their 1967 hit "Time Has Come Today"), in tunes
like "Papa was a Rollin' Stone" from the Temptations which incorporated
the Isaac Hayes "Shaft" wah-wah guitar and echo effects. Michael Jackson,
the most famous of Gordy's proteges, came to symbolize the combination of
white and black, pop and soul, elements, and is perhaps the extreme conse-
quence of Gordy's attitude. Jackson, the "King of Pop," left Motown for Epic
records in 1 976, and with his surgically created white features superimposed
on music with gospel and blues elements carefully muted, created a massive
crossover appeal, highlighted by his dancing style and videos and adorned
by his marriage (then divorce) to Elvis Presley's daughter and his purchase
of the Lennon-McCartney songbook.
The vocal urgency and syncopated dance rhythms of gospel along with
top-notch r&b house bands came together most clearly in the music of James
Brown. Combining a Little Richard-style act with other theatrics from Joe
Tex and a pleading version of Ray Charles gospel/ soul, Brown started as a
singer with the Gospel Starlighters then the Fabulous Flames, and recorded
the hit "Please, Please, Please" in 1956 for King records. With his Live at
the Apollo in 1962 which reached no. 2 on the pop charts, Brown became
"Soul Brother Number One." 26 Building on his traveling road show and hot
bands, and following Bo Diddley's rhythmic focus and recasting of African
rhythms, with "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" of 1965, Brown moved to
a rhythmically charged vamp as the basis for the whole song, minimizing
elements of melody and harmony: soul changed to funk. A new guitar style
emerged, influenced by Stax's Steve Cropper, aping the "hit" of a brass sec-
tion, and the bass and drummer, players like Bootsie Collins and Clyde
Stubblefield, became the lead players. A succession of hits, "Cold Sweat,"
"I Got The Feeling," "Sex Machine" and others followed, influencing all
forms of black music. Examples include Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye
at Motown (notably with Gaye's What's Going On of 1971 and Wonder's
Inner Visions of 1973, with the funky, inspirational "Higher Ground," sub-
sequently covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers), and leading to Sly and
The Family Stone, George Clinton's Parliament- Funkadelic, and Curtis
Mayfield's and Isaac Hayes' versions of 1970s funk.
Building on Hendrix and Brown, Clinton's "extreme funk," combined
with hippie culture, appealed to whites and blacks in the 1970s, as an
1 79 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
"alternative nation" with an "Afrodelic" image crossing the boundaries on
the shared experiences of drugs and funky music. It was accompanied by
a move in the opposite direction, in the Philadelphia sweet soul sounds of
male black groups, such as the Delfonics, Billy Paul, and the O'Jays, who
revived the doo-wop spirit soaked with the beautiful side of soul. Popular
bands such as Earth, Wind, and Fire and Kool and the Gang ("Celebration"
in 1980) found niches in between hard funk and soft soul, and dance records
that defined disco - the watered-down version of soul and funk that cele-
brated black then white urban and gay cultures - became hugely popular,
appropriated egregiously by white band the Bee Gees and in the movie
Saturday Night Fever.
Blues and gospel beyond the 1960s
The legacy of classic rock music and its format borne of r&b dominated until
the 1 990s, but has given way to a multitude of new styles, rap and techno-pop
in particular. Blues-based guitarists and bands nonetheless persist: Stevie
Ray Vaughan's Texas Flood of 1985, Robert Cray's Strong Persuader in 1986,
John Lee Hooker's revival in The Healer in 1989, and the continuing Johnny
Winter, ZZ Top, and Steve Miller Band, along with the Allman Brothers
and Lynyrd Skynyrd in the legacy of the immensely successful southern U.S.
Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Soul music returns every few years, powered by white appropriations
such as the Blues Brothers movie of 1980, and the Commitments movie and
soundtrack, which associated the Irish underclass with their black counter-
parts in the U.S. But the banner of soul and funk for black audiences has
persisted in the TV. show Soul Train, started in 1970 by Don Cornelius and
continuing as the longest-running syndication show, providing "cultural
common ground" for African Americans, with the "Soul Train Dancers,"
and the Soul Train Music Awards and Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards
honoring r&b, rap/hip-hop, jazz and gospel artists. Judging by the online
comments at the web site, many viewers want to see shows from the first
decade revived, particularly those of James Brown, so that new fans can see
the "classic" r&b artists, who continue their immense influence.
While whites have generally kept the blues past alive in re-creations,
Prince, strangely from Nordic Minnesota, home of Garrison Keiler's white
bread Prairie Home Companion and Jesse Ventura's white-trash wrestlers,
has been one of the most adventurous musicians of the 1980s and 1990s.
Along with Janet and Michael Jackson, he combined funk and dance music,
but added white hard rock and r&r heavy guitar elements. Prince, like
Jackson, is a crossover artist, combining many elements, and like Little
180 DaveHeadlam
Richard, reveling in sexual ambiguity and excess. Prince's "slave" contract
struggles and his loss of identity to an unpronounceable symbol can all be
read as part of his struggle to find an identity in the white-controlled music
business.
If the blues and gospel expressed the condition of blacks early in the
twentieth century, and r&b, then soul were increasingly integrated forms
of the blues reinfused with gospel as blacks gained in social and economic
status, then rap is the expression of the problems - poverty, unemployment,
drugs, gangs - that remain in the inner city. Fused from gospel's preacher
style of speaking, the Jamaican tradition of rhyming over discs in clubs,
the technology of the DJ and the house party, and the syncopated, dance
beats and reduction of melody and harmony to rhythm of James Brown's
funky music, rap adds stark lyrics revealing the conditions of lives led in the
black community. Rap also emerged in response to white appropriations of
black music. With every inventive new form taken and covered by whites
for more money, fame, and influence, and with no interest in r&r or rock,
particularly in its punk or grunge manifestations of the 1970s or 1980s,
black musicians took to the streets in spoken poetry over the tools of the
D J's trade: the scratching turntable and heavy beat. Dating from Sugar Hill's
"Rapper's Delight" of 1979, using an underlying disco track, and pioneers
Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler), blacks created a
music, like bebop, that whites had great difficulty in coming to terms with,
since rap seemed to defy all musical standards. As with r&b, however, whites
were involved in the production and record labels. Arthur Baker, for instance,
is an influential and early hip-hop producer, crossing over to introduce the
art of remixing into the pop mainstream, and working with Bambaataa.
With the advent of digital sampling, rappers were themselves accused of
stealing rock music samples and electronically recycling funk. Appropriation
did come, starting in reverse with Run DMC's cover of Aerosmith's "Walk
This Way" (1986) and subsequent video on M.T.V., and also in traditional
form with the white Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, and Eminem. On M.T.V.,
which originally was slow to show black videos, rap had an equally difficult
time breaking in, but rap shows like "M.T.V. Raps" quickly became popular
and rap is currently a staple of M.T.V. and "the Box" Video channel (now
M.T.V.2). Rap has become a music of fusion in the wake of its exposure
and appropriation, with rap-funk - George Clinton crossed with Coolio
and Ice Cube - and rap-metal, led by mostly white bands like Limp Bizkit,
who build on the heavy black rock of Bad Brains and Living Color but add
white-boy heavy metal rap on top. In a Motown celebratory release of 1998,
Puff Daddy is acclaimed as the new Berry Gordy as rap becomes corporate,
with families of groups coalescing around Def Jam records and producers
like Dr. Dre. Some rap has kept its original edge, with "gangsta" wars that
181 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
have resulted in the death of rappers Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G.,
and others.
Jamaicans in the 1 950s listened to the latest r&b at public dances, evolving
a system of DJs and sound systems. Hybrid forms started combining r&b
elements with native music, producing ska (1961), rocksteady (1967) and
reggae (1968), which were appropriated soon after in Britain and later the
U.S. Clapton, for instance, covered a Bob Marley tune, "I Shot the Sheriff"
(1974), to introduce white audiences to a white-washed reggae beat, and
the Police introduced ska to white America. In Jamaica, reggae took on
nationalist and religious connotations. First singer Jimmy Cliff was popular,
then Bob Marley, the reggae superstar born of mixed-race parents, became
their patron saint. Reggae thus became symbolic for Jamaicans as blues
and gospel had for African Americans. Along with reggae musical forms,
Jamaican dance hall culture became part of the rave dance scene in the U.S.
and Britain. 27
With the rise of rap, blues has become largely a historical form. On the
Internet, sites like the "House of Blues" have sprung up, and the legacy of
the blues is available for download and has been celebrated; journals like
Living Blues and labels like Alligator promote young players but mostly
revive memories of the past. The coalition of "white intellectuals, college
students, liberals, cognoscenti [who] rediscovered the blues in their quest
for 'truth,' " as well as the many European and world blues fans, lives on
and promotes "authentic" blues online. 28 B. B. King, in particular, since
his 1968 concert at the Fillmore West in San Francisco to a mostly white
audience, has become a beloved American Ambassador of music. Taking
over the role from Louis Armstrong and traveling through the world, King
has established blues alongside jazz as the US.'s native music. His many
honors include multiple Grammies, a Kennedy Center award, induction
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, three Blues Image awards from the
N.A.A.C.R, and a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Award, and
his influence, among others, has prompted the Grammy Awards to include
categories for Traditional Blues Album and Contemporary Blues Album.
John Lee Hooker is also celebrated, with a 1989 Grammy for his CD, The
Healer, which includes duets with many disciples. The awards these artists
get are emblematic of the showering of "Hall of Fame" accolades given to
the black forerunners of contemporary popular music. While the origins of
the Grammies are steeped in racism and the white recording establishment
wanting to stop r&r and r&b, admitting only jazz from black sources, these
and other awards have come to recognize the sources of much American
popular music. 29 With the aging and deaths of the original r&b performers
like Joe Turner, who died broke and with debts in 1987, the level of rip-
offs has come out to embarrass some of the companies, like Atlantic, who
182 DaveHeadlam
profited from their talents. Atlantic has "'recalculated' the royalties due
on foreign sales and reissues of old records" and "contributed $2 million to
establish a foundation that makes tax-free grants to the down-on-their-luck
pioneers of rhythm and blues." 30
In the gospel world, the title role in the 1960s was played by James
Cleveland, the "Crown Prince of Gospel," who, following Joe May, the "King
of Gospel Singers" in the 1950s, expanded on gospel's boundaries into pop-
ular styles, a "soul man, the first to really wed gospel and pop" creating the
modern gospel sound. Cleveland started an annual Gospel Music Workshop
of America in 1 968 to spawn a revival of the gospel choir, and his death at age
sixty from AIDS caused some soul-searching in the gospel community. 31
The gospel choir tradition championed by Cleveland continues, with groups
like the Mississippi Mass Choir hitting the charts and winning Gospel,
Traditional, and Spiritual awards for their recordings and videos, and ac-
colades from Billboard Magazine and N.A.R.M. (National Association of
Record Merchandisers) . In the mid- 1 970s, the Edwin Hawkins Singers' "Oh
Happy Day" was a no. 1 song, the biggest gospel hit of all time, and in its
wake artists such as Andrae Crouch, the Winans Family, and Sweet Honey
in the Rock made their way into the mainstream. The gospel vocal group
has found a popular voice in Take 6, a highly successful crossover ensemble
drawing from virtually all aspects of their heritage.
The piano remains the primary instrumental signifier of the gospel
song. Gospel piano style, particularly in its boogie-related elements, orig-
inally influenced the rock'n'rollers Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Fats
Domino, and formed an essential part of Ray Charles' soul innovations,
Aretha Franklin's initial recordings, and Stevie Wonder's Motown songs.
It has continued to wind its way through the solo piano tradition in rock
music, from Carole King to Leon Russell, Stevie Winwood, Elton John, Billy
Joel, and Bruce Hornsby, and songs like the Beatles' "Let It Be" and Paul
Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Water."
Like blues players, accolades have come to gospel singers. Marion
Williams received a MacArthur genius award and the Kennedy Center
Honors in 1993 as part of the mass recognition by the media of the
wellsprings of American music. The Grammy Awards include categories
Rock Gospel, Southern, Country, or Bluegrass Gospel, Pop/Contemporary
Gospel, Traditional Soul Gospel, Contemporary Soul Gospel, and Gospel
Choir or Chorus. Gospel elements have continued in the parallel white
and black streams, with "Contemporary Christian" the trade name for
white gospel; ironically, Pat Boone switched from his successful role as an
r&r cover artist to his equally successful Christian white-gospel albums in
the 1970s. The breadth of fusion and crossover in Christian-gospel music
is indicated by the Gospel Music Association's Dove awards, with categories
183 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
for Rap/Hip Hop/Dance, Modern Rock/Alternative, Hard Music, Rock,
Pop/Contemporary, Inspirational, Southern Gospel, Bluegrass, Country,
Urban, Traditional and Contemporary Gospel, Instrumental, and Praise &
Worship.
The Philadelphia "beautiful" sound of the Delfonics and other groups
in the 1970s persists in "contemporary r&b" styles with Luther VanDross
and many others, continuing a tradition of romance-soaked slightly funky
tunes with strings (real or synthesized) setting the generally overblown
mood. Motown continues in L.A., with Boyz II Men, reviving the a cappella
group love style, and Babyface Edmonds, a writer, performer in Sam Cooke
mold, re-creating a sugary, love-filled style. The vocal inflections and timbres
of gospel, after working through soul, continue to influence female vocal
styles - Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker, but also the white
Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey and Christina Aguillera, who mechanically
ornament every note and appear in videos with black rappers and dancers
in excessive attempts at "authenticity" - and in a diluted pop fashion in the
resurgence of the male vocal group ('N'sync, Backstreet Boys, Westlife).
Following jazz, which was a music fusing different styles from its incep-
tion, blues and gospel-influenced forms have been fused with music from
around the world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Robert Palmer
has noted the global influences in U.S. popular music from the 1960s, citing
music from Africa, Europe, and India in the rhythms, harmony, and melody
of blues-based forms. 32 The rise of "world music" - a term which reflects
a Western focus on music from all different countries - has set the tone
for new definitions of appropriation, crossover, and fusion of and between
styles from around the world. The white face of this music has been pre-
sented by David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, and others who variously
promote and appropriate its elements. As with blues and gospel, the many
styles represent the hopes, aspirations, fears, and humanity of people from
all racial and geographical groups, and the continuing cry for individual
and collective freedom. 33
Themes
Throughout this chapter, and to an extent throughout the Companion,
several themes have recurred in the story of blues and gospel appropria-
tions. The first is the essential racial and economic point: the white en-
tertainment industry cashes in on appropriated versions of largely black
musical styles by appealing to the mass audience, altering the context and
leaving the original performers and writers with little or no compensation
and/or acknowledgment. The practice, excoriated in Sonny Boy Williamson
184 DaveHeadlam
IPs song "(I Ain't) Fattenin' (No More) Frogs For Snakes," is part of the ex-
ploitation of blacks by whites throughout American history, where blacks
are excluded from positions of ownership or authority. 34 This theme in-
cludes four related components. First, in court cases in the 1940s and 1950s,
copyright for musical arrangement was disallowed, in a ruling that only
traditional song elements could be copyrighted. After this ruling, uphold-
ing the traditional elements of the notated song in the Tin Pan Alley tradition
versus the stylistic elements of records, a performer's style could be copied,
without compensation. In practice, however, there was constant litigation
over cover versions, but the original black performers mostly lost out to white
cover versions. 35 Second, in competition between major labels with national
distribution and small independent, regional labels, the larger companies
quickly covered regional hits or styles. The sales and distribution of pro-
motional copies of covers hurt the original artists, who often had a royalty
based only on their own recordings. The big labels also signed up the original
artists and, inevitably, diluted the original style in the rush for higher sales
and put the smaller labels out of business. Moves by Elvis Presley (1955)
and Ray Charles (1960) to RCA Victor from the Sun and Atlantic labels are
often cited as examples. 36 Third, when songs were recorded, publishing and
songwriting copyrights were often given to producers, record-label owners,
and even DJs, who were assured of continuing income with sales, especially
if the song went into multiple versions, while the original artists were paid on
a once only "for hire" basis or given minimal royalties. Thus, Chuck Berry's
first song "Maybellene" has DJ Alan Freed added as a "writer" as payola
for his services. Little Richard was paid $50 for "Tutti Frutti" by Art Rupe
of Specialty Records, with a royalty of 1/2 cent per record (instead of the
standard 2 cents), then sold all his rights for $10,000 when he turned to re-
ligion, and later settled in a suit for $40,000, for songs that made millions. 37
Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers received a 1 cent per record royalty for
"Why Do Fools Fall in Love," only after recording session costs were paid
off, with publishing and writer credits assigned to the record label. 38 Record
labels also owned the master tapes, so that performers had no access to their
own recordings. This form of economic appropriation applied to white and
black musicians, but blacks suffered disproportionately as their styles were
the ones that set the trends. Finally, the fourth consideration is that the
music industry is a business, designed to make money; any time big money
became involved, the usual criminal-type elements emerged: shake-downs,
rip-offs, bribes, beatings, intimidation, and the mob. In such a climate, with
profit as the sole motivator, all involved parties were subject to abuse, but
particularly the artists, who were regarded as expendable cash cows, and
black artists, in particular, who had few rights or recourse. 39
185 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
The second theme is the connection between the metaphor of the "grain"
in the sound and distinctions between blues and gospel-related music and
"pop" versions of these styles. 40 Both blues and gospel are essentially vocal
musics, with string bending and the bottleneck slide on the guitar and the in-
flections of the harmonica as surrogates for the sliding, bending, expression
found in vocal blues, and the vocal virtuosity in choirs and in small groups -
sometimes with voices imitating instruments - in gospel. Pop music versions
are those in which appropriated elements - particularly vocal - are trans-
formed by reducing or eliminating the grain in the sound:
(1) vocal quality is made purer, with less "noise" in the sound from articulation,
and the continuity of pitch and timbre is closer to classical music;
(2) the vocal line is smoothed out, removing many of the nuances and ornamental
figures used in blues and gospel expression;
(3) lyrics are altered from real-life experiences to idealized states, generally of love
and loss in an abstract sense;
(4) instrumentation and timbre are also made more pure, with less articulation and
noise in the sound, and instruments characteristic of other musical styles are
added (strings, harpsichords etc.), and;
(5) rhythm and phrase length is evened out and squared off, with ambiguities and
fluidity curtailed.
These pop alterations have the effect of making the sound less personal and
more objectified and predictable, and so more available to a wide audience.
A related metaphor is the presence or feel of the "body" in the sound: the
physical elements of exertion in the voice, and dance elements in the body,
often linked back to African musical and dance forms, are a physicality that
is removed in pop appropriations, with their flattening of texture, emotion,
and expression.
The third theme in the appropriation of blues and gospel is a political
and social one: the role of blues and gospel appropriations in the history
of black Civil Rights. The rise of r&r from r&b in the 1950s and 1960s,
the transformation of blues in British rock music and subsequent popular-
ity of British musicians in the U.S., the blues revival lead by the folk-rock
movement in the U.S.A., and the rise and crossover success of Motown and
soul music, coincided with a series of social and legal events that led to
the Civil Rights legislation of 1960s. The entry of black music into white
society mirrored gains in rights of blacks themselves. Along with gospel
music and its most successful proponent Mahalia Jackson, soul music, with
its mixed-race house bands backing black singing stars was, in particular,
associated with Martin Luther King. Setbacks occurred in this continuing
struggle. King died in April 1968 in Memphis, following the riots in the pre-
vious year in Detroit and elsewhere, which heightened tensions between the
186 Dave Headlam
white establishment and the new advocates of "Black Power." A backlash fol-
lowed the militant outcries against white ownership of radio and recording
companies by the "Fairplay Committee" at the 1968 N.A.T.R.A. (National
Association of Television and Radio Announcers) convention and subse-
quent resegregated black music forms. Yet soul and funk music retained
its influence in the black community. Thus the "crossover" associated with
blues and gospel music-derived styles was a political as well as musical
process. 41
The fourth theme involves the problems inherent in the writing of a
history for blues and gospel music and the appropriation of these elements.
These problems are analogous to those of transcribing the oral and recorded
forms of blues and gospel music in written notation: important elements
are missed, and the choices made often force the music into contexts based
more on the notation than the expression. Any history is a story of historical
fiction, with "facts" presented from viewpoints that bias their interpretation.
For instance, Robert Palmer dramatizes the problems of interpretation by
comparing the story of the blues through the eyes of writers either fascinated
or horrified by its influence on rock music, a "great man" theory of the
blues, to a living history of day-to-day life in Mississippi or elsewhere, an
"everyman" story where performers lived and played and recorded and died
amid impoverished conditions, with none of their posthumous fame or
influence in evidence. 42
Many histories written from the former point of view - blues and gospel
as precursor to rock - add a disapproving tone and tendency to find that black
performers are authentic, original, and generally virtuous in their honest ex-
pression, while white performers and music industry types are inauthentic,
rip-off artists, representative of the homogenizing marketplace and generally
despicable in their appropriations. Such a view, while true in many cases, can
also distort the musical situation. The view that awards Robert Johnson the
mantle of the original master of country blues and Eric Clapton a condem-
nation as a shallow imitator, for instance, ignores the traditional evolution
of blues songs, where continual reworking of lyrics, melodies, and instru-
mentation into ever new styles is fundamental. In this context, Johnson
and Clapton are similar, in that they took from many existing sources and
reworked songs, in either close covers or more dramatic reconstructions, to
create their own styles.
Another effect of written histories of the blues with a view to the future
has been attempts to define black styles as "authentic" by some precondition
frozen in time: the case of Leadbelly is an example. Huddie Ledbetter, or
Leadbelly, a folk-blues singer using an unusual twelve-string guitar, had a
legendary life story: gaoled for murder in 1917, pardoned through his music
in 1925, then gaoled and pardoned again by his music in 1934. "Discovered"
187 Appropriations of blues and gospel in popular music
by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1933, who was attempting to find a "pure"
source for black blues and folksongs recordings for the Library of Congress,
and who reasoned that gaol might be a place to find such an unaffected
black source, Leadbelly was initially set in a frame of authenticity from this
scholarly/museum keeper point of view: a primitive hayseed strumming his
authentic songs - blues, lullabies, cowboy songs - on an old beaten-up guitar.
Leadbelly eventually freed himself from this caricature and traveled in style
(as far as France in 1949), singing a wide variety of music. Ironically, it was
his signature song, "Goodnight Irene," with none of the blues elements he
supposedly exemplified, which was covered by the Weavers and Pete Seeger
in 1950 to become a big hit. Leadbelly was also unusual in that he had a white
following, and he was later invoked as a forerunner of the folk movement
of the 1960s, and of the skiffle craze in Britain, following the recording
of his "Rock Island Line" by Lonnie Donegan (1956), that influenced the
Beatles. 43
Performers like Leadbelly, as well as Robert lohnson and others, are
often defined as "folk" or "blues" performers in light of their influences
and recordings, but at the time they sang songs in all different styles and
their talents defy easy categorization. In lohnson's case, the preponderance
of blues songs in his recordings may reflect only the recording date and
interests of the recording label, not necessarily the sum total of the musician;
like many blues singers, he was fluent in many styles, listened to the radio and
recordings, traveled widely, and even admired Bing Crosby. 44 It is impossible
in such cases to speak of "pure" forms of blues or gospel; they are both
hybrid forms reflecting the interaction of races and classes and the effects of
society, traveling, records, and radio. The expression is, however, individual,
and while the story of blues and gospel developments and appropriations
has not been kind to the original practitioners, their lives and art continue
to speak to us.
Notes
1 Surveying the field: our knowledge of blues
and gospel music
1 Oliver (1984) explores some of this other
material.
2 Useful outlines of the social history of black
Americans can be found in Carroll and Noble
(1977), Marable (1984), and Zinn (1980).
3 The term was already common currency in
jazz discourse. See Ulanov (1947).
4 For a fuller discussion of this issue, see
Peter Narvaez (1993). Charters' later writings,
e.g., The Bluesmen, are more considered in this
respect: indeed, performance details are given
at least as much coverage as lyrics, while the
focus is on the individual artistry of
particular singers.
5 The concept is crucial to much of the study
of folksong in a variety of different cultures,
while the practice of lines wandering from one
blues to another had been noticed as early as
1911 by Howard Odum (see Oliver 1969: 27).
6 The concept was first introduced by Gates
(1988).
6 "Black twice": performance conditions
for blues and gospel artists
1 A Jim Crow car is a railroad car on which
African Americans were "Jim Crowed"
or discriminated against - segregated,
overcrowded, given inferior facilities, etc.
7 Vocal expression in the blues and gospel
1 Paul Oliver discusses the relevance and
difficulties of piecing the history of the blues
together from recordings, in Oliver (1968). A
similar argument can be made for the history
of gospel singing, which had a parallel growth
during the last century.
2 From Chris Albertson's notes to Bessie
Smith, The Complete Recordings Vol.1, 1991,
Columbia Roots and Blues Series.
3 Lomax's "Cantometrics" proposed a causal
connection between sociological factors and
songstyle, in a number of papers (1962, 1967)
and subsequently the 1968 book which
expanded all these earlier ideas more fully and
which included dance style.
4 Register definitions are taken from
Thurman and Welch (1997) in which (p. 239)
they identify four registers with associated
muscular activity. These are pulse register or
vocal fry, lower register or modal register
(commonly known as "chest" register),
upper register (known as "head" register)
and falsetto (male) or flute (female)
register.
5 Estill's work is scientifically based and
published but is also used practically and
described as a teaching tool by Estill trainer
Gillyanne Kayes (2000).
6 The development of the concept of a
"classically" trained or "schooled" voice is
discussed in detail in the definitive study:
Potter (1998).
7 For a fuller history of the influence of
conservatoire and Western classical traditions
on African American musical history see
Southern (1997: 265-96).
8 Alfred Wolfsohn developed a
psychotherapeutic methodology of working
with vocal timbres which developed the
capacity for women to speak and sing in bass
and men in soprano ranges, and developed
extraordinary individual vocal flexibility. Roy
Hart took this work into theatre practice after
Wolfsohn's death eventually founding the Roy
Hart Theatre based in France and
demonstrated this vocal flexibility in
Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs For A Mad
King which was written for the Roy Hart
Theatre to perform. Paul Newham developed
the work along more psychotherapeutic lines
in Britain training vocalists to identify what
is happening to a client by making identical
vocal sounds and experiencing the laryngeal
mechanisms at play.
9 Discussed in Kemp (1996: 173-82).
10 "Reach and collapse" is a common
technique - singers reach upwards in pitch, or
by increasing intensity through volumes,
growls or wails, then release physically on the
breath and with the body.
1 1 In "I asked for water, you gave me
gasoline."
12 Gilbert Rouget has written and researched
extensively into the complex relationship
between music and trance behavior, many of
his examples are from sub-Saharan
communities and their diaspora. Some gospel
churches embraced "speaking in tongues" and
"being taken over by the spirit" as a central
part of their practice.
189 Notes to pages 112-145
13 In discussion with Dr. Maraire in Malawi
at a Choral Conference I learned that the
practice of high-registered male singers
singing soprano was commonplace in his
experience, and only discouraged,
interestingly, by Western classical choral
directors who found the timbres inconsistent
with the requirements of the soprano parts.
14 Referring to Barthes' seminal essay on
"The Grain of the Voice" (1988). He uses this
terminology specifically to refer to two
Western classical singers. I appropriate the
sense because the concept is pertinent when
here applied to blues and gospel singers.
15 His quotation begins Oliver's (1968)
exploration describing the nature of
"the spiritual" as elusive against other
factors which may be more easily analyzed.
9 Keyboard techniques
1 A walking bass line was first used in a
published composition by the late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century classical virtuoso
and ragtime pianist "Blind" Boone in his
"Rag Medley no. 11" of 1909. It was also a
feature of early Harlem Stride pianist Eubie
Blake's 1899 composition "Charleston Rag"
where a left-hand walking bass in octaves
supports the ragtime-influenced right hand.
2 I.e., the major scale with a flattened-
seventh note.
3 The distinction straight/swing is that
between metronomically even eighth notes
and those where the first of a pair of eighth
notes is lengthened at the expense of the
second.
4 The "lick" became a signature element of
Charles' right-hand playing. Starting with an
ascending octave leap on the dominant it
cascades down the tonic major arpeggio
crushing major and minor thirds together,
passes through chords IV and I dim coming
to rest on I 7 .
5 The "Hucklebuck" was a popular 1940s
dance and Amnions' left-hand pattern was
used as the basis for an r&b no. 1 hit of the
same by Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams in 1949.
10 Imagery in the lyrics: an initial approach
1 Discussion in these areas can be found, for
example, in Courlander (1963) or Oster
(1969).
2 Spurgeon (1975: 5).
3 Katherine Baker. "Mistreated Blues."
Chicago or Richmond, Ind., May 18, 1927.
Issued on Gennett 6321. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 193)
4 Luella Miller. "Dreaming of You Blues."
New York City, January 28, 1927. Issued on
Vocalion 1081. Reissued on Document DOCD
5183. (lyric transcription in MacLeod 5: 203)
5 Charley Jordan. "Starvation Blues."
Chicago, January 6, 1931. Issued on Vocalion
1627. Reissued on Document DOCD 5097.
(lyric transcription in R'sB: 25)
6 Alice Moore. "Grass Cutter Blues." Chicago,
May 22, 1936. Issued on Decca 7190.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5039. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP 2013)
7 Alice Moore. "Telephone Blues." Chicago,
May 22, 1936. Issued on Decca 7190. Reissued
on Document DOCD 5039. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP 2013)
8 Luella Miller. "Smiling Rose Blues." Chicago
or St. Louis, Mo., April 26, 1927. Issued on
Vocalion 1104. Reissued on Document DOCD
5183. (lyric transcription in MacLeod
5: 205)
9 Rev. J. M. Gates. "Hitler and Hell." Atlanta,
Ga., October 2, 1941. Issued on Bluebird
B8851. Reissued on Document DOCD 5484.
(R'sB-. 172)
10 Lizzie Washington. "Mexico Blues."
Chicago or Richmond, Ind., May 19, 1927.
Issued on Black Patti 8054. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 196)
1 1 Tampa Red. "Stormy Sea Blues." Chicago,
April 3, 1936. Issued on BlueBird B6425.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5207. (lyric
transcription in MacLeod 6: 23)
12 Edgewater Crows. "No Bonus Blues."
Hattiesburg, Miss., July 15, 1936. Issued on
Melotone 7-01-62. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5611. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 126)
13 Francis "Scrapper" Blackwell. "Springtime
Blues." Richmond, Ind., February 4, 1930.
Issued on Gennett 7158. Reissued on Blues
Documents BDCD 6029. (lyric transcription
in sleeve notes to Agram Blues ABLP 2008)
14 Josh White. "Low Cotton." New York City,
August 15, 1933. Issued on Banner 32858.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5194. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 68)
15 Katherine Baker. "Wild Women Blues."
Chicago or Richmond, Ind., May 18, 1927.
Issued on Gennett 6194. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 192)
16 Walter Davis. "Moonlight Is My Spread."
Chicago, 31 October, 1935. Issued on BlueBird
B6167. Reissued on Document DOCD 5282.
(lyric transcription in MacLeod 8: x)
190 Notes to pages 145-151
17 Charlie Spand. "Hard Time Blues."
Grafton, Wis., September 1931. Issued on
Paramount 13112. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5108. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 26)
18 Ibid.
19 "Big" Joe Williams. "Providence Help the
Poor People." Chicago, February 25, 1935.
Issued on Bluebird B5930. Reissued on Blues
Documents BDCD 6003. (lyric transcription
in R'sB: 74)
20 "Big" Joe Williams. "His Spirit Lives On."
Chicago, 1945. Issued on Chicago 103.
Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD 2017.
(lyric transcription in R'sB: 74)
21 Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. "Red Cross
Sto'." Washington, D.C., August 23, 1940.
Unissued Library of Congress. Issued on
Document DLP 610. (lyric transcription in
R'sB: 58)
22 Ibid.
23 Peter "Doctor" Clayton. "Pearl Harbor
Blues." Chicago, March 27, 1942. Issued on
Bluebird B9003. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5179. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 151)
24 Soul Stirrers. "Pearl Harbor - Part 1."
Chicago, July 2, 1947. Issued on Aladdin 2025.
Reissued on Imperial LMLP 94007. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 157)
25 Robert "Barbecue Bob" Hicks. "We Sure
Got Hard Times." Atlanta, Ga„ April 18, 1930.
Issued on Columbia 14558-D. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5048. (lyric transcription
in R'sB: 20)
26 Rev. R. H. Taylor. "The Bonus Have Found
the Stingy Mens Out." Hattiesburg, Miss.,
July 21, 1936. Issued on Melotone 6-11-64.
Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD 2017.
(lyric transcription in R'sB: 127)
27 Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter.
"Mr. Hitler." New York City, January 20, 1942.
Unissued Library of Congress. Issued on
Rounder CD 1046. (lyric transcription in
R'sB: 173)
28 Sonny Boy Williamson. "Check up on My
Baby." Chicago, December 14, 1944. Issued on
Bluebird 34-0722. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5058. (lyric transcription in
R'sB: 179)
29 Edith North Johnson. "You Know That
Ain't Right." Long Island City, N.Y.C.,
c. December 1928. Issued on QRS R7048.
Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD 2016. (lyric
transcription in the sleeve notes)
30 Alice Moore. "Telephone Blues." Chicago,
May 22, 1936. Issued on Decca 7190. Reissued
on Document DOCD 5039. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP2013)
31 Alice Moore. "Doggin' Man Blues."
Chicago, March 25, 1937. Issued on Decca
7380. Reissued on Document DOCD 5291.
(lyric transcription in sleeve notes to Agram
Blues ABLP2013)
32 Mary Johnson. "Muddy Creek Blues."
Brunswick 7093. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5305. (lyric transcription in sleeve
notes to Agram Blues ABLP 2014)
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Mary Johnson. "Rattlesnake Blues."
Richmond, Ind., September 22, 1932. Issued
on Champion 16570. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5305. (lyric transcription in sleeve
notes to Agram Blues ABLP 2014)
36 Luella Miller. "Rattle Snake Groan."
New York City, January 28, 1927. Issued on
Vocalion 1081. Reissued on Document DOCD
5183. (lyric transcription in MacLeod 5: 203)
37 Will Weldon (Casey Bill). "Spider Blues."
Chicago, October 20, 1937. Issued on
Vocalion 04318. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5219. (lyric transcription in MacLeod
6: 175)
38 Alice Moore. "I'm Going Fishing Too."
Chicago, May 22, 1936. Issued on Decca 7253.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5039. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP 2013)
39 Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. "Red Cross
Sto'." Washington, D.C., August 23, 1940.
Unissued Library of Congress. Issued on
Document DLP 610. (lyric transcription in
R'sB: 58)
40 Ibid.
41 Louis Jordan. "Ration Blues." Los Angeles,
October 4, 1942. Issued on Decca 8654.
Reissued on Decca BM 03545. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 184)
42 Sonny Scott. "Red Cross Blues No. 2."
New York City, July 20, 1933. Issued on
Vocalion 02614. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5450. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 53)
43 Earl Thomas. "Bonus Men." Chicago,
July 7, 1936. Issued on Decca 7221. Reissued
on Document DOCD 5645. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 126)
44 Edith North Johnson. "Nickles Worth of
Liver Blues." Richmond, Ind., September 7,
1929. Issued on Paramount 12823. Reissued
on Agram Blues ABCD 2016. (lyric
transcription in the sleeve notes)
45 Edith North Johnson. "Honey Dripper
Blues." Richmond, Ind.; September 7, 1929.
Issued on Paramount 12823. Reissued on
Agram Blues ABCD 2016. (lyric transcription
in the sleeve notes)
191 Notes to pages 151-157
46 Edith North Johnson. "Soothing Syrup
Blues." St. Louis, May 15, 1961. Issued on
Folkways LP 3815. (lyric transcription in
sleeve notes to Agram Blues ABCD 2017)
47 Edith North Johnson. "Ain't No More
To Be Said." Chicago, November 16, 1929.
Issued on OKeh 8748. Reissued on Agram
Blues ABCD 2016. (lyric transcription in
the sleeve notes)
48 Lizzie Washington. "Skeleton Key Blues."
Chicago or Richmond, Ind., April 19, 1927.
Issued on Gennett 6134. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 194)
49 Luella Miller. "Wee Wee Daddy Blues."
Chicago, August 1, 1928. Issued on Vocalion
1234. Reissued on Document DOCD 5183.
(lyric transcription in MacLeod 5: 210)
50 Jack Kelly. "President Blues." New York
City, August 2, 1933. Issued on Banner 32857.
Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD 2017. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 66)
51 Luella Miller. "Tombstone Blues."
Chicago, January 24, 1928. Issued on
Vocalion 1151. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5183. (lyric transcription in
MacLeod 5: 208)
52 George Noble. "T. B. Blues." Chicago,
March 20, 1935. Issued on Vocalion 02954.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5191. (lyric
transcription in MacLeod 5: 315)
53 Alice Moore. "Blue Black and Evil Blues."
Chicago, July 19, 1935. Issued on Decca 7132.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5291. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP 2013)
54 Elizabeth Washington. "Riot Call Blues."
Chicago, August 2, 1933. Issued on BlueBird
B5229. Reissued on Document DOCD 5182
and 5315. (lyric transcription in MacLeod
5: 198)
55 Alice Moore. "Push Cart Pusher." Chicago,
October 26, 1937. Issued on Decca 7393.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5291. (lyric
transcription in sleeve notes to Agram Blues
ABLP 2013)
56 Jack Kelly. "President Blues." New York
City, August 2, 1933. Issued on Banner 32857.
Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD 2017. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 66)
57 Ibid.
58 Edith North Johnson. "Ain't No More To
Be Said." Chicago, November 16, 1929. Issued
on OKeh 8748. Reissued on Agram Blues
ABCD 2016. (lyric transcription in the sleeve
notes)
59 Lizzie Washington. "Sport Model Mamma
Blues." Chicago or Richmond, Ind., May 19,
1927. Issued on Gennett 6195. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 196)
60 Rev. J. M. Gates. "Hitler and Hell."
Atlanta, Ga., October 2, 1941. Issued on
Bluebird B8851. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5484. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 172)
61 Lizzie Washington. "My Low Down
Brown." Chicago or Richmond, Ind., April 19,
1927. Issued on Gennett 6126. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 194)
62 Edith North Johnson. "You Ain't No Good
Blues." Long Island City, N.Y.C., c. December
1928. Issued on QRS R7048. Reissued on
Agram Blues ABCD 2016. (lyric transcription
in the sleeve notes)
63 Beckson and Ganz (1972: 162).
64 Rev. J. M. Gates. "Hitler and Hell."
Atlanta, Ga., October 2, 1941. Issued on
Bluebird B8851. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5484. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 172)
65 Joe Pullum. "C.W.A. Blues." San Antonio,
Tx., April 3, 1934. Issued on Bluebird B5534.
Reissued on Document DOCD 5393. (lyric
transcription in R'sB: 69)
66 Jimmy Gordon. "Don't Take Away My
P.W.A." Chicago, October 2, 1936. Issued on
Decca 7230. Reissued on Agram Blues ABCD
2017. (lyric transcription in R'sB: 107)
67 Charlie McCoy. "Charity Blues." Chicago,
August 13, 1934. Issued on Decca 7046.
Reissued on Blues Documents BDCD 6019.
(lyric transcription in R'sB: 106)
68 Charley Jordan. "Look What a Shape I'm
In (Bonus Blues)." Chicago, November 2,
1937. Issued on Decca 7455. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5099. (lyric transcription
in R'sB: 129)
69 Katherine Baker. "Wild Women Blues."
Chicago or Richmond, Ind., May 18, 1927.
Issued on Gennett 6194. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5182. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 5: 192)
70 Zion Travelers. "Movin' up the King's
Highway." Los Angeles, March 18, 1954.
Issued on Score 5054. Reissued on Imperial
LP 9240. (untranscribed)
71 Biddleville Quintette. "This Train Is
Bound for Glory." Chicago, c. January 1927.
Issued on Paramount 12448. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5361. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 10: x)
72 Mother McCollum. "Jesus Is My
Air-O-Plane." Chicago, c. mid- June 1930.
Issued on Vocalion 1616. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5101. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 3: 184)
192 Notes to pages 157-178
73 Jaybird Coleman. "I'm Gonna Cross the
River of Jordan - Some O' These Days."
Birmingham, Al., August 5, 1927. Issued on
Silvertone 5172. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5140. (lyric transcription in MacLeod
Yazoo 21-81: 28)
74 Selah Jubilee Singers. "I'll Fly Away."
New York City, February 21, 1941. Issued on
Decca 7831. Reissued on Document DOCD
5499. (lyric transcription in MacLeod 13: x)
75 Rev. McGhee. "I'm a Soldier in the Army
of the Lord." Clarksdale, Miss., c. 19 or 26
July, 1942. Issued on Library of Congress AFS
LP 59. Reissued on Document DOCD 5312.
(lyric transcription in MacLeod 8: x)
76 Rev. Sister Mary Nelson. "The Royal
Telephone." Chicago, April 21, 1927. Issued
on Vocalion 1109. Reissued on Document
DOCD 5072. (lyric transcription in
MacLeod 2: 298)
77 Alphabetical Four. "I Want Two Wings to
Veil My Face." New York City, August 16,
1938. Issued on Decca 7507. Reissued on
Document DOCD 5374. (lyric transcription
in MacLeod 10: x)
1 1 Appropriations of blues and gospel
in popular music
1 Liner notes for Chuck Berry: The Chess Box,
MCA Records 1998.
2 Barthes (1988).
3 Freed and other DJs themselves
appropriated black DJ styles. See George (1988).
4 Los Angeles was also somewhat prominent
with Roy Milton, Joe Liggins, T-Bone Walker,
Johnny Otis, Charles Brown, and many record
labels.
5 Booklet from Bo Diddley, The Chess Box,
MCA Records, 1990, and Diddley's interview
in The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s,
pp. 181-90.
6 That Elvis did not continue in r&r, but
aside from the introduction concert to his
1968 comeback fell back into the crooning
ballads and pop mannerisms of predecessors
such as Dean Martin, a succession of bad
movies contracted by his prototypical evil
manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and eventual
Las Vegas show hell, is one of the ironic, but
truly American, aspects of the story.
7 Dawson and Propes (1992).
8 Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" has come
to represent the 1950s by its use in movies of
the time like Blackboard Jungle, and the later
George Lucas movie American Graffiti and
associations with the TV show Happy Days.
As with the white Original Dixieland Jazz
Band, however, most listeners had no idea
of the appropriations involved. Belz
(1972: 33-8) and Clarke (1995: 382) note
Haley's sixty U.S. chart hits in seven years.
Friedlander (1996: 39) adds that
"approximately twenty-five major movies
were devoted to the subject of rock and roll,"
including Chuck Berry in Rock, Rock, Rock,
Mr. Rock and Roll, and Go Johnny Go and Little
Richard in Don't Knock the Rock and The Girl
Can't Help it.
9 Marcus (1975).
10 Szatmary (1991: 29-30), notes in 1968
Dick Waterman, a manager for many of the
older blues players, tried to help Crudup get
royalties, $60,000 from Hill and Range Songs,
which owned Crudup's songs, but owner,
Julian Aberbach, wouldn't sign the deal.
1 1 The list could include Jimmy Page
(Led Zeppelin), Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac),
Jeff Beck (Jeff Beck Group), Alvin Lee
(Ten Years After), and many others.
12 Headlam (1997).
13 See Hatch and Millward (1987) on
families of blues songs. Storm Roberts (1972:
197) traces such songs like "Spoonful Blues"
back to African music: not harmonically
structured, just shifting chords in an overall
repetitive form with one-chord
accompaniment.
14 See Murray (1989: Ch. 3).
15 See Headlam (1995 and 1997).
16 Young (1997: 235).
17 Oliver (1986) and Heilbut (1997); Malone
(1974: 226) notes the c&w influence on
gospel, as in the 1948 song "Gospel Boogie,"
by white group, the Homeland Harmony
Quartet.
18 Miller (1999: 67-78); Clarke (1995:
370-1), and Belz (1972: 26-7).
19 i.e., quavers [ed.].
20 See Guralnick (1986: Ch. 1); Miller (1999:
76-7) calls vocal covers a "switch."
21 Clarke (1995: 414).
22 The father of gospel, Dorsey, set the
standard for this confrontation: he started as
blues singer Georgia Tom, singing sexually
charged blues of the twenties, but became the
Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, writing gospel
standards "Peace in the Valley" and "Take my
Hand, Precious Lord" and becoming a leading
publisher of religious songs. See Heilbut
(1997: Ch. 2). Broughton, Ellingham,
Muddyman, and Trillo (1994: 632) note the
gospel saying "The Devil Stole the Beat" for
this phenomenon.
23 Heilbut (1997: Ch. 7).
24 Belz (1972: 180).
25 George (1987).
26 And the "Godfather of Soul," and "The
Hardest Workin' Man in Show Business."
193 Notes to pages 181-187
27 Miller (1999: 304-11).
28 Keil (1966: 100-101).
29 Schipper (1992).
30 Wade and Picardie (1990: 20-1).
31 Heilbut (1997: 218, 350).
32 Palmer (1995: 75-7); Palmer notes
James Jamerson, the bass player for Motown,
citing African, Cuban, and Indian scales in his
work (p. 88).
33 Broughton, Ellingham, Muddyman, and
Trillo (1994).
34 Perry (1988: 58) details the N.A.A.C.P's
1987 report on racism in the music industry,
called The Discordant Sound of Music. Among
other facts, of 9,000 radio stations, fewer than
400 were for black listeners, and in general,
blacks were underrepresented in positions of
authority, ownership, had less pay, were
bypassed for promotion, and too little money
was spent promoting black artists and with
minority businesses. This situation represents
the state of the music industry throughout the
twentieth century.
35 Clarke (1995: 368), referring to the 1940s
developments in r&b and pop: "Along the way
an historic court case settled the question of
whether music arrangements could be
copyrighted, and the answer was that they
could not. A Little Bird Told Me,' a song by
Harvey O. Brooks, was recorded by Paula
Watson on a Supreme label. Decca copied not
only the arrangement but also the vocal style
to the last inflection, and had a big hit in 1948
by Evelyn Knight . . . Supreme sued, and lost."
Stokes, Tucker, and Ward (1986: 75), notes
that Don Robey of Duke-Peacock Records
successfully sued Sam Phillips of Sun Records
for "Bear Cat" infringing on "Hound Dog,"
and that LaVern Baker found no legal
recourse in trying to stop cover girl Georgia
Gibbs from stealing her style and
arrangements (p. 93).
36 Booklet to Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul,
The Complete Atlantic Rhythm and Blues
Recordings 1952-59, Atlantic/Atco Remasters,
1991.
37 Wade and Picardie (1990: 74).
38 Stokes, Tucker, and Ward (1986: 127-8).
Clarke (1995: 113-20) chronicles the rip-off
by George Goldner and Morris Levy on the
"Gee" label, where the song was "sold" for
$50, but in continuing litigation was awarded
to the two remaining members of the
Teenagers, Herman Santiago and Jimmy
Merchant, for their original version, "Why do
Birds Sing so Gay?" in 1991 - thirty-six years
later.
39 Wade and Picardie (1990: Chs. 2-4).
40 "Pop" music is often defined just as music
that is "popular" in terms of sales, as in
Palmer (1995: 9). In this view, any kind of
music can be pop music, from Robert Johnson
to Lawrence Welk. Another view places pop in
the tradition of Tin Pan Alley songsters,
whose songs were published as sheet music
and were intentionally simple enough to be
easily remembered. A history of popular
music that follows the Billboard charts
exclusively misses much influential music,
but documents record company roles and
public interest. See Belz (1972: Introduction).
See Clarke (1995) for the balance of the
popular and the "real," or lasting and
influential.
41 Perry (1988); George (1988); Jones
(Bakara) (1963).
42 Palmer (1982: 1-20).
43 Miller (1999: 186-8); Davis (1995:
164-72), who asserts that "Irene" was
originally a Tin Pan Alley waltz by an
Irish composer, and Hatch and Millward
(1987: 12) on Leadbelly's cover versions.
44 Booklet to Robert Johnson: The Complete
Recordings, Columbia, 1990.
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Selected discography and videography
Berry, Chuck. 20th Century Masters. MCAD 11944.
Blake, Blind. "Third Degree Blues." Blind Blake: Complete Recorded Works in
Chronological Order, Vol. 4. Document CD 5027.
Broonzy, Big Bill. "Plow Hand Blues." Big Bill Broonzy: Complete Recorded Works In
Chronological Order, Vol. 10. Document CD 5132.
Burnside, R. L. / Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down. Fat Possum 0332-2.
Carr, Leroy. Sloppy Drunk. Catfish KATCD 108.
Caston, Leonard "Baby Doo." "The Death of Walter Barnes." Decca 7763, 1940.
Cream. Best of Cream. ATCO SD 33-291.
Davenport, Cow Cow. "Jim Crow Blues." Cow Cow Davenport: Complete Recorded
Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1. Document CD 5141.
Diddley, Bo. The Chess Masters Series. Chess CXMD-4003.
Dorsey, Thomas. Georgia Tom vol. 1 1928-1930. Document BDCD-6021.
Georgia Tom vol. 2 1930-1934. Document BDCD-6022.
Dranes, Arizona. Arizona Dranes 1926-1929. Document DOCD-5186.
Franklin, Aretha. Aretha Gospel. MCA Chess MCD 91521.
Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet. "Golden Gate Gospel Train." Jubilation! Great Gospel
Performances, Vol. 1: Black Gospel. Rhino Records R2-70288.
Hawkins, Edwin. "Oh Happy Day." Jubilation! Great Gospel Performances, Vol. 1:
Black Gospel. Rhino Records R2-70288.
Henderson, Rosa. "Back Woods Blues." Rosa Henderson: Complete Recorded Works
in Chronological Order, Vol. 2. Document CD 5402.
"Chicago Policeman Blues." Rosa Henderson: Complete Recorded Works in
Chronological Order, Vol. 4. Document CD 5404.
Hooker, John Lee. The Real Folk Blues. Chess, reissued MCA CHC 9271.
The Healer. Silvertone ORE 508.
House, Eddie "Son." "County Farm Blues." The Complete Library of Congress
Sessions, 1941-1942. Travelin' Man CD 02.
Howlin' Wolf. The Collection. Deja vu DVLP 2032.
Jackson, Mahalia. "Precious Lord." Mahalia Jackson: Gospels, Spirituals & Hymns.
Columbia Legacy CK-65596.
The Best of Mahalia Jackson. Columbia Legacy 480952 2.
James, Elmore. One Way Out. Charly TC-CRB 1008.
Johnson, Peter. The Chronological Pete Johnson 1938-1939. CLASSICS 656.
Johnson, Robert. The Complete Recordings. Columbia C2K-46222.
Jordan, Louis. Choo-choo-ch'boogie. MFP 50557.
King, Albert. King of the Blues Guitar. Atlantic ATL 40499.
King, B. B. Greatest Hits. ABC MCLC 1612.
"The Thrill is Gone." Blues Masters: Vol. 7, Blues Revival. Rhino Records R271 128.
Lenoir, J. B. "Born Dead." Vietnam Blues. Evidence CD 26068.
203 Selected discography and videography
Maceo, Big. The Best of Big Maceo. Arhoolie Folklyric CD 7009.
McCrackling, Jimmy. The Walk. Charly RED2 100.
McDowell, Fred. "Fred McDowell's Blues." 61 Highway Mississippi: Delta
Country Blues, Spirituals, Work Songs & Dance Music. Rounder Records
CD-1703.
McTell, Blind Willie. "Monologue on Himself." Blind Willie McTell (1940).
Document CD 6001.
Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Blues in the
Mississippi Night. Rykodisc CD 90155.
Montgomery, Little Brother. Little Brother Montgomery 1930-1936. Document
DOCD-5109.
Muddy Waters. "Hoochie Coochie Man." Muddy Waters: The Chess Box. Chess
CHD3-80002.
The Collection. Deja vu DVLP 2034.
Preston, Jimmy. "Rock the Joint." Jimmy Preston: Rock the Joint, Vol. 2. Collectables
Col-CD-5327.
Reed, Dock et al. "Jesus goin' make up my dyin' bed"; http://memory.loc.gov/afc/
afcss39/268/2682b2.mp3
Smith, Bessie. "St. Louis Blues." The Essential Bessie Smith. Sony/Columbia
C2K-64922.
Soul Stirrers. "Precious Lord." Black Vocal Groups, Vol. 4, 1927-1939: Complete
Recorded Works ofErnia Mae Cunningham, Davis Bible Singers, Diamond Four,
Fa Sol La Singers, Fairview Jubilee Quartette, Famous Myers Jubilee Singers, Five
Soul Stirrers. Document Records DOCD-5552.
Sykes, Roosevelt. Roosevelt Sykes vol. 4, 1934-1936. Document DOCD-5119.
Vaughan, Stevie Ray. Texas Flood. Epic 463395/4.
Walker, T-Bone. The Collection. Deja vu DVLP 2047.
Ward, Clara. "Precious Lord." Gospel Warriors: 50 Years of Female Gospel Classics.
Spirit Feel SF-1003.
Williamson, Sonny Boy. "Stop Breaking Down." Sonny Boy Williamson: Complete
Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 5. Document CD 5059.
Yancey, Jimmy. Complete Recorded Works vol. 1, 1939-1940. Document DOCD
5041.
Various. Barrelhouse Blues & Boogie-woogie vol. 1. Storyville STCD 8030.
Boogie-woogie & Barrelhouse Piano vol. 1, 1928-1932. Document DOCD-5102.
Boogie-woogie Blues. Biograph BCD 115 DDD.
Chicago Guitar Killers. Blue Knight BN 073-1669.
Chicago Piano 1929-1936. Document DOCD-5191.
Down in Black Bottom: Lowdown Barrelhouse Piano. YAZOO 2043.
Great Gospel Performers 1937-1950. Document DOCD5463.
Harlem Hamfats - Hot Chicago Blues & Jive 1936-37. Arhoolie Folklyric 9009.
Jubilation vol. 1: Black Gospel. Rhino R2 70288.
Piano Blues and Boogie Classics. Arhoolie CD 108.
The Piano Blues Dallas 1927-1929. MAGPIE PYCD 15.
St. Louis Barrelhouse Piano 1929-1934. Document DOCD-5104.
The Slide Guitar. CBS CT 46218.
204 Selected discography and videography
Sweet Heaven - The Sound of Gospel Music. Flapper LCI 836.
Storefront & Streetcorner Gospel 1927-1929. DOCD-5054.
Texas Piano vol. 1, 1923-1935. DOCD-5224.
Texas Piano vol. 2, 1927-1938. DOCD-5225.
Say Amen Somebody. 1983. Directed by George T. Nierenberg. VHS, 100 min.,
colour.
Index
Allen, Estelle 139
Allen, George N. 82, 83
Allison, lesse 79
Amnions, Albert 136
Armstrong, Louis 69, 160
Atlantic Records 176-7
Baker, Arthur 180
Baker, Katherine 143, 145, 155
Baker, LaVern 105
baUad 22-3
Bambaataa, Africa 180
Baraka, Amiri 8, 9
Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) 147
barrelhouse 32, 130-1, 135
characteristics of, 130-1
Barthes, Roland 161
Bass, Ralph 99
Beatles, The 169-70
Beck, Elder Charlie 105
Belafonte, Harry 166
Bennet, Lonnie 96
Berman, Bess 55
Berry, Chuck 108, 125, 158-60, 163, 184
Besman, Bernard 120
Black, Bill 165
Black Sabbath 127
Blackwell, Bumps 57
Blackwell, Scrapper 32, 136, 144
Blake, Blind 91
Blake, Eubie 131
Blakey, Rev. lohnny 113
Bland, Bobby 98
Bloomfield, Michael 127
blues
African elements in 23—4
animal imagery in 145-9
boogie-woogie 32, 131-4, 136
characteristics of 10, 21-2, 30-1
city blues 7, 15-16
classic blues 4, 5, 8
country blues 3, 15-16
downhome blues 3, 18
education imagery in 153-4
everyday imagery in 151-3
food imagery in 149-51
instrumental combinations in 24, 28, 31—3,
38-40
as type of jazz 26-7
nature imagery in 143-5
origins of 2, 20-1, 22-2
personifications in 154-5
regional variations of 14-16, 30-1, 38, 111-12
rural blues 3, 15
twelve-bar form 22-3
urban blues 4, 15
[205]
Bolden, Alfred 139
Bond, Graham 140
Booker T & the MGs 126
Boone, Pat 161, 165, 182
Bostic, Earl 95
Boyd, Eddie 99
Boyer, Horace 92, 95, 1 10, 1 1 1, 1 12
BoyzIIMen 183
Bradford, Perry 27
Bradley, Marie 103
Brenston, lackie 164
Broonzy, Bill 4, 16, 32, 91, 96
Broughton, Viv 6
Brown, Clarence "Gatemouth" 123
Brown, Henry 135
Brown, James 175, 178, 179
Brown, Ruth 94, 105
Brown, Roy 162
Burleigh, Harry T. 106
Burnside, R. L. 9, 128-9
Butterfield, Paul 127
Byrd, Josephine 106
Campbell, Lucie E. 138
Canned Heat 127
Carr, Leroy 32, 136
Cephas, John 92, 101
Chambers Brothers, The 178
Charles, Ray 57, 135, 136, 140, 173-5
Charters, Samuel 8, 16, 141
Cheeks, Julius 110-11, 175
Chess Records 163
Chords, The 172
Christian, Charlie 122
Civil Rights movements 3, 4, 42, 56, 185
Clapton, Eric 17, 126, 127, 160, 167-8, 181, 186
Clash, The 125
Clayton, "Doctor" 36, 146, 148
Clemen, Wolfgang 142
Cleveland, James 58-9, 138, 182
Cliff, Jimmy 181
Clinton, George 178-9
Coasters, The 172—3
Cole, Nat King 174
Cooder, Ry 119-20, 128
Cooke, Sam 56-8, 98, 109, 172, 175
copyright 6
Courlander, Harold 10
Cream 168
Crew Cuts, The 172
Crosby, Fanny 13
cross-over 158-60, 185
blues to pop 124, 169-70
gospel to pop 56-7, 59-60, 139, 171-3
pop to gospel 139-40
Crudup, Arthur "Big Boy" 36, 165-6
206 Index
Custer, Clay 132
Custer, Hersal 132
Dallas String Band 3 1
Davenport, Charles "Cow Cow" 89, 135
Davis, Fanny 6 1
Davis, Francis 7
Davis, Gary 1
Davis, Walter 34, 145
Diddley, Bo 118, 125, 163
Dixon, Willie 72, 108, 113, 124, 163
Domino, Fats 161, 164
doo-wop 172-4
Dorsey, Thomas A. 6-7, 32, 52-3, 58, 81-6,
124-5, 138
Dranes, Arizona 132-3
Drifters, The 173
Dunn, Leslie 114
Duskin, Big Joe 99
Edgewater Crows, The 144
Edmonds, Babyface 183
Edwin Hawkins Singers, The 140, 182
electrical recording process 29, 122
Ellington, Duke 80
Estill, Jo 105-6, 109
Evans, David 15, 17
Fairfield Four, The 95
Falls, Mildred 85
Fame Records 176
Ferguson, H-Bomb 92, 93-4
Fisk Jubilee Singers, The 6, 50-1, 52
Five Blind Boys of Alabama 111,112
Five Blind Boys of Mississippi 112
Floyd, Samuel 1, 10-11
Franklin, Aretha 113, 138-9, 174, 175
Franklin, Rev. C. L. 113, 138, 175
Freed, Alan 162-3, 184
Frith, Simon 112, 113
Fulson, Lowell 40
Garon, Paul 141
Gates, Rev. J. M. 144, 154
Gaye, Marvin 178
George, Nelson 9
Golden Gate Quartet 79-81, 113
Gordon, Jimmie 155
Gordy, Berry 177
gospel
characteristics of 10, 48, 53-4
early hymns 44-6
genre 6-7
gospel organ 139
gospel piano 132, 138, 182
"holiness" movement 5 1-2, 54
regional variations 49-5 1
sacred song 5
spirituals 5, 7, 46-9
Grateful Dead, The 127
Green, Lee "Porkchops" 134
guitar 116-29
electric guitar 3-4, 31, 36, 37, 40-2, 121-3
slide guitar 117-20
Guy, Buddy 104, 108
Haley, Bill 164-5
Hall, Vera 79
Hamilton, Roy 57
Hammond, John, Jr. 160
Handy, W. C. 26, 68-9
Haralambos, Michael 8
Harlem Hamfats, The 36
Harris, Michael 6-7
Harris, Rebert H. 56, 83-4, 172
Harris, Wynonie 38, 162
Harrold, Melanie 108
Hawkins, Edwin see Edwin Hawkins Singers
Heavenly Gospel Singers, The 1
Heilbut, Anthony 6, 93, 94, 1 10, 138
Henderson, Rosa 89, 91
Hendrix, Jimi 42, 167-9
Hoffman, Robert 25
Holly, Buddy 125
Hooker, John Lee 37, 104, 105, 108-9, 113,
120-1, 127, 162, 168, 181
Hopkins, "Lightnin" Sam 16, 37, 116
House, Son 90, 91, 120
Howell, Peg Leg 3 1
Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett) 109, 127, 170
Hughes, Langston 98
Hurt, Mississippi John 117
integration 100
Isley Brothers, The 170
Izenhall, Aaron 95
Jackson, George Pullen 5 1
Jackson, Mahalia 55-6, 85-6, 95, 139, 170
Jackson, Michael 178
James, Elmore 108, 124, 162
James, Etta 104-5, 109
Jefferson, Blind Lemon 28-9, 41,116-17
Jeter, Claude 175
Johnson, Blind Willie 117-19
Johnson, Edith 148, 151, 153, 154
Johnson, Lonnie 29, 39
Johnson, Mary 148-9
Johnson, Pete 136
Johnson, Robert 15, 35, 64-6, 104, 105, 117, 118,
119-20, 160, 162, 168, 186
Jones, Johnny 137-8
Jones, LeRoi see Baraka, Amiri
Jones, Nancy 114
Jones, Ralph 85
Joplin, Scott 5
Jordan, Charley 143, 155
Jordan, Louis 38, 140, 150, 162
Kayes, Gillyanne 106-7
Keil, Charles 4, 8, 13, 98
Kelly, Jack 152, 153
King, Albert 126
King, B. B. 29, 41, 76, 90, 92, 93-5, 97, 122-3, 181
King, Freddie 125-6
King, Martin Luther 56, 185
Koda, Cub 14
Laine, Frankie 163
Lanchester, Michelle 105-6
Laver, J. 103, 108
207 Index
Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) 146, 147, 149-50,
186-7
Led Zeppelin 168
Lewis, Meade "Lux" 135-6
Lieber, Jerry 172-3
Limp Bizkit 180
Little Richard (Richard Penniman) 160-1, 164,
184
Little Walter (Walter Jacobs) 72, 108, 122
Lockwood, Robert, Jr. 19
Lomax, Alan 61, 102, 103-5, 119, 187
Lomax, John 77, 90
Longshaw, Fred 69
Lornell, Kip 92
Licas, Lazy Bill 17-18
Lymon, Frankie, and the Teenagers 173, 184
Macleod, R. R. 141-2, 143
Magby, Luther 133
Maggio, Antonio 25
Marley, Bob 181
Martin, Roberta 59, 138
Martin, Sallie 53
Mather, Cotton 49
May, Joe 182
Mayall, John 17
McCoy, Charlie 155
McDowell, Fred 61-6
McPhatter, Clyde 173
McTell, Bline Willie 90, 1 18
Memphis Minnie (Minnie McCoy) 33, 113
Mendelsohn, Fred 59
Merriweather, Big Maceo 137
migrations 3,4
Miller, Eddie 136-7
Miller, Luella 143-4, 149, 152
Mississippi Mass Choir 182
Mississippi Sheiks, The 3 1
Montgomery, "Little Brother" Eurreal 134
Moore, Alice 143, 148, 149, 152-3
Moore, Scotty 165
Moore, Will 120
Morris, Kenneth 139
Morrison, Dorothy 86-8
Morrison, Van 121
Morton, Jelly Roll 133-4
Motown Records 177-8
Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) 4, 16,
72-4, 96, 108, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128-9,
137-8, 162, 170
Murray, Albert 8
Newham, Paul 106
Nierenberg, George 13
Noble, George 137, 152
Oakley, Giles 7
Oliver, Paul 7, 112, 141
Orioles, The 57
Oster, Harry 7
Owens, Henry 80
Palmer, Robert 129, 183, 186
Patton, Charley 2
performance venues 96-7
Philips, Washington 133
Phillips, Sam 163
piano 4, 34-5, 130-40
Platters, The 173
Pratcher, Miles 61
Presley, Elvis 57, 158-60, 163-4, 165-6, 171
Preston, Billy 58, 139
Preston, Jimmy 70-2
Prince (Rogers Nelson) 179-80
Puff Daddy (Sean Combs) 180
Pullum, Joe 155
"race" records 28, 33
ragtime 4, 26, 135
Rainey, Ma 97
rap 180-1
Ravens, The 173
Ray, Johnny 163
Redding, Otis 169, 176
Reed, Dock 79, 84
Reed, Jimmy 125
rhythm' n'blues (r&b) 4, 9, 162-6
Richards, Keith 127
rock'n'roll (r&r) 4, 40-2, 162-6
Rodgers, Jimmie 16, 165
Rolling Stones, The 17, 127, 170
Rupe, Art 57
Rush, Otis 108
Rushing, Jimmy 112
Sachkeim, Eric 141
Sankey, Ira 5, 6, 13
Schiffman, Frank 103
Scott, Sonny 150
Seals, Baby 25-6
segregation 2, 5-6, 21
Shapiro, Anne Dhu 10
Shaw, Robert 132
Sinatra, Frank 122
Sledge, Percy 176
Small, Christopher 2, 8
Smith, Bessie 1, 67-70, 97, 103, 105, 106, 107,
113
Smith, Clarence "Pine Top" 32, 131, 136
Smith, Eugene 59
Smith, Mamie 27
song family 10
soul music 40, 174-8
Soul Stirrers, The 56-7, 83, 109, 146-7, 172
Southern, Eileen 10
Spand, Charlie 145
Spann, Otis 137-8
Spirit of Memphis 92
Spurgeon, Caroline 142, 156
Staples, Clive "Pops" 124
Staples Singers, The 173-4
Starr, Edwin 178
Stax Records 176
Stoller.Mike 172-3
Storm Roberts, John 7-8, 10
Sykes, Roosevelt 34-5, 134, 135, 151
Taft, Michael 141
Taj Mahal 128
Take 6 182
208 Index
Tampa Red (Hudson Whitaker) 32, 134, 137,
144
Taylor, Koko 109
Taylor, Rev. R. H. 147
Taylor, Walter 31
Tamptations, The 178
Terry, Sonny 36
Tharpe, Sister Rosetta 124
Thomas, Earl 150
Tindley, C. Albert 52
Titon, Jeff Todd 9-10
Toure, Ali Farka 128
Townsend, Henry "Mule" 128
Tucker, Ira 98
Tucker, Tommy 105
Turner, Ike 140, 164
Turner, "Big" Joe 38, 164
VanDross, Luther 183
Vaughan, James D. 1 70
Vaughan, Jimmie 128
Vaughan, Stevie Ray 128
Walker, Aaron "T-Bone" 29, 41, 123
Wallace, Wesley 135
Wand, Hart A. 25
Ward, Clara 84-5, 95
Washington, Albert 95-6
Washington, Dinah 57, 59
Washington, Lizzie 144, 151, 152, 153, 154
Watts, Isaac 45
Weldon, Will 149
Wheatstraw, Peetie 34, 135
White, Georgia 33
White, Josh 144-5
White, Leroy "Lasses" 26
Wlliams, Hank 165
Williams Jo Jo 18
Williams, "Big" Joe 145-6
Williams, Marion 182
Williamson, John Lee "Sonny Boy" 35-6, 94,
126, 147
Wilson, Jackie 177
Winter, Johnny 127, 128
Wolfsohn, Alfred 106
Wonder, Stevie 178
Yancey, Jimmy 136
Z.Z.Top 128
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